Many UI libraries being built today want to be very forward-focused, so they focus on being as general as possible. This does make some sense, especially considering that, for better or worse, using a web browser engine as a UI has become increasingly popular of a decision. However, in the end this leads to almost all new "greenfield" UI projects trying to develop scalable vector UI rendering engines that need advanced and highly optimized vector rendering libraries like Skia and Pathfinder. Having everything in vector all the way through is elegant, but it's complicated.
The insight with GPUI is that it's not really necessary to be that general, the vast majority of UIs are made up of a relatively small number of different primitives that you can build on to basically do anything. So instead the vast majority of what's going on in GPUI is layers of roundrects. Text rendering is the classic approach of rendering into glyph atlases. I think this is a vastly more sustainable model for a UI library.
I don't know if GPUI is ready to be used on its own, but it does have a spiffy if brief website.
Given that Zed actually has good "UI-feel", it tells me they are focused on the right things. A lot of new greenfield UI frameworks are spending a ton of time on trying to build extremely generic vector graphics systems but the actual widgets feel bad and are missing all kinds of tweaks and nuance. Here's a good litmus test for text editors: what happens if you double click and drag? In most good UI frameworks, this should result in word selection and then expanding that selection left or right. In a lot of smaller greenfield UI libraries, something vastly less useful will happen :(
Lots of the app’s UI right now is a layer of components on top of gpui (check out the ui crate!) that are pretty Zed-specific at the moment.
Some of these things will likely be made more general and have dedicated gpui elements built for them (button, input…)
I think not rushing to cover everything right out the gates is giving us the time to feel out apis that feel good to write and work well for us. Hopefully in the near future that translates to a UI library that is awesome for the whole rust community to use.
Thanks for the links. The approach described in that blog post seems like it could actually achieve crisp, native-looking text. What a welcome improvement that would be compared to the blurry, misshapen, overlapping, or poorly laid out results I've seen from other new GUI frameworks.
https://zed.dev/blog/videogame
Many UI libraries being built today want to be very forward-focused, so they focus on being as general as possible. This does make some sense, especially considering that, for better or worse, using a web browser engine as a UI has become increasingly popular of a decision. However, in the end this leads to almost all new "greenfield" UI projects trying to develop scalable vector UI rendering engines that need advanced and highly optimized vector rendering libraries like Skia and Pathfinder. Having everything in vector all the way through is elegant, but it's complicated.
The insight with GPUI is that it's not really necessary to be that general, the vast majority of UIs are made up of a relatively small number of different primitives that you can build on to basically do anything. So instead the vast majority of what's going on in GPUI is layers of roundrects. Text rendering is the classic approach of rendering into glyph atlases. I think this is a vastly more sustainable model for a UI library.
I don't know if GPUI is ready to be used on its own, but it does have a spiffy if brief website.
https://www.gpui.rs/
Given that Zed actually has good "UI-feel", it tells me they are focused on the right things. A lot of new greenfield UI frameworks are spending a ton of time on trying to build extremely generic vector graphics systems but the actual widgets feel bad and are missing all kinds of tweaks and nuance. Here's a good litmus test for text editors: what happens if you double click and drag? In most good UI frameworks, this should result in word selection and then expanding that selection left or right. In a lot of smaller greenfield UI libraries, something vastly less useful will happen :(