Dioxus 0.5: Web, Desktop, Mobile Apps in Rust

I build a Mastodon client with Dioxus last year [1] and it was in general a good experience, but it was also clear that lots of things were still missing (I mean, it was also at version 0.2 when I started working on it).<p>With these 0.5 changes the Dioxus authors remove almost all the complexities that I ran into when working on Ebou. I haven&#x27;t played around with it yet, but the removal of lifetimes and constant cloning will make it a much more pleasant experience. I&#x27;m looking forward to trying it out, congratulations to the team for such an awesome release!<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;terhechte&#x2F;Ebou">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;terhechte&#x2F;Ebou</a>

I&#x27;ve been following dioxus with interest despite not having a chance to use it yet.<p>However I&#x27;m a bit perplexed with the solution to remove lifetimes [0]. Isn&#x27;t it a poor&#x27;s-man GC? What was the performance impact?<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crates.io&#x2F;crates&#x2F;generational-box" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crates.io&#x2F;crates&#x2F;generational-box</a><p>Side-note: `[generational-box](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crates.io&#x2F;crates&#x2F;generational-box" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crates.io&#x2F;crates&#x2F;generational-box</a>)` link is broken

I’m not a Rust programmer, but I’m curious, and I’m wondering if someone could explain how their generational-box crate works? [1]<p>I understand that it’s some kind of arena allocation, but I don’t understand how they support copying without copying, or how this is safe:<p>&gt; Internally, generational-box creates an arena of generational RefCell&#x27;s that are recycled when the owner is dropped. You can think of the cells as something like &amp;&#x27;static RefCell&lt;Box&lt;dyn Any&gt;&gt; with a generational check to make recycling a cell easier to debug. Then GenerationalBox&#x27;s are Copy because the &amp;&#x27;static pointer is Copy<p>Like okay, you can create a pointer to static data, but what if it’s something that doesn’t have a static lifetime?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crates.io&#x2F;crates&#x2F;generational-box" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crates.io&#x2F;crates&#x2F;generational-box</a>

Been following this for a while and super excited to see it out! I love how Dioxus captures a lot of what made React successful, but also while innovating on top of it and shipping at a super fast rate.<p>Congrats to the team. Excited to try out the signals in this release.

I kinda wish instead of RSX we got something closer to SwiftUI than to React&#x2F;JSX<p>I feel like despite the name and all the good it did for JS and the web, React is not exactly how I would envision &quot;reactive UI&quot; code to look like in 2024 if we have the choice of designing a language (or DSL) from a blank state<p>Which is not to say SwiftUI is perfect, but whatever code I write with it feels much more neatly organized &#x2F; compartmentalized than similar code using React<p>IMHO the only real advantage of using JSX for cross-platform GUIs is... to reuse existing libraries that were built for the web, which means something like RSX has very little &quot;transferable value&quot; other than letting the developer transfer their conceptual knowledge of JSX to RSX. I&#x27;d argue that&#x27;s a worse tradeoff than having the developer learn some new paradigm that is (again IMHO) objectively superior to the React&#x2F;JSX one<p>TL;DR &quot;SwiftUI but cross-platform&quot; is the project I wish existed but doesn&#x27;t. I&#x27;m aware of @Tokamak&#x2F;TokamakUI but that&#x27;s still very much incomplete and activity seems to have waned

I just picked Dioxus to build a decentralized homepage for Freenet[1], it will be the first decentralized website people see when they get Freenet set up. It reminds me a bit of my Kotlin web framework called Kweb[2] that I&#x27;ve been working on on-and-off for a few years now, particularly the way it handles state and the DSL that maps from code to HTML. So far I like what I see.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kweb.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kweb.io&#x2F;</a>

How does this compare to Tauri?

How does this render native apps? Is it still within a browser instance of some kind?

&gt; There’s still a tiny bit of unsafe floating around various dependencies that we plan to remove throughout the 0.5 release cycle<p>I&#x27;d love to see what these usages are, and what motivates this. I understand that sometimes people reach for unsafe too eagerly. But the std is full of unsafe and drawing the line there sometimes seems like a line in the sand.

Honest question: I get why React has created the naming convention of &quot;use*&quot; for their hooks API. It makes sense to me. But why is in Dioxus creating a new signal called &quot;use_signal&quot;? This function call creates a new signal, doesn&#x27;t it? The signal is not recreated on every rendering (that&#x27;s the whole point of signals).<p><pre><code> let mut count = use_signal(|| 0); </code></pre> In SolidJS you create a signal with createSignal, which makes much more sense to me.<p><pre><code> const [count, setCount] = createSignal(0) </code></pre> The naming of the API matters, because state hooks behave much differently and might have complementing needs like &quot;useMemo&quot;.<p>Is there a reason Dioxus for the &quot;use_signal&quot; naming other than trying to be close to React?

Congrats to the team! I know it has been a long process, but kudos for sticking with it!

&quot;Here at Dioxus Labs, we have an unofficial rule: only one rewrite per year.&quot;<p>If you have to rewrite your code once a year, maybe it helps to plan ahead before coding.<p>But, if you can rewrite your code once a year, you might not have too much code to worry about.

Congratulations on the new release!<p>How is the support for SVG which I can interact with? I’m thinking of something like drawing a sudoku as an SVG, then letting people click on each cell.

I&#x27;m really excited about this project because it means you can build a single app and deploy it easily anywhere. And in a single language.

Does anyone know how well this integrates with web components? I struggled getting Shoelace components to run well with Yew. It was doable, but by the time I had it working I decided I was using the wrong tool for the job. I&#x27;d like to revisit that project with another Rust framework though when I can find the time.

I did a `dx build --release --platform web` of their default client-only web template and the resulting `du -sh dist&#x2F;` is 2.1M. The .wasm file is 1.9M.<p>I&#x27;m guessing there is no way that&#x27;s getting smaller?<p>I have some projects in the 1kb to 100kb territory I wouldn&#x27;t mind rewriting, but not to that size.

Huge release, congrats! I&#x27;m most interested in Dioxus-Blitz. Congrats to Nico for joining the team (I think?).

Congrats on the launch! Really excited to see the move to signals + curious to see how Blitz 2.0 goes.

How does Dioxus fare as a native GUI lib? Last time I checked the focus was on web targets and both the built in wgpu renderer and skia backend were not supported as much.

Dioxus is framework that compiles Rust to WebAssembly in order to build a webapp that uses the native OS webbrowser for rendering and interaction.

Is any part of the existing ecosystem that expects Scope usable in a new world without Scope?

Yesterday there was another really interesting rust library, egui, on the front page of HN. I can tell that this is more like react, but how do they compare in other regards?

I especially like the blurb at the bottom about the blitz rewrite using servo!

I am pretty interested, but can I not use TS&#x2F;JS for the UI if I want to?