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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Something similar but also totally different is https://makepad.nl/ - a graphics programming IDE in Rust, for Rust, targeting the browser.

It's a totally different use case but there's some similarities, somehow, anyway.

Unlike this app, its actually all WASM and the author frequently tweets about how he feels more productive building a web UI in Rust than he would HTML+CSS+JS. And you can say what you want, the thing is damn snappy.

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EDIT-but-can't-edit-anymore:

I just noticed that https://makepad.dev/ hosts a different version that I think is newer. Skip the .nl one.

Is it just me that finds all the text rendering on this page really bad?

It is, and it only supports ASCII so anyone who wants to write comments or text in Chinese, Japan, Korean, Thai, Arabic, etc can GTFO :(

Definitely not, it does not look pleasant to me either. At first I thought it was just the small font size, but I noticed it on the "Edit" page as well.

Everything is rendered directly to a canvas, at the very least it lacks subpixel rendering

One can use the Freetype library to render beautifully sharp text directly to a canvas with gamma-correct subpixel alpha coverage. Why this Rust website uses such blurry fonts, I don't know, it reminds me of playing an OpenGL/DirectX video game where the text is rendered using cached texture-filtered quads: maybe good enough for game UI, but not for intensive reading.

For those wondering why: subpixel rendering requires knowing the subpixel layout of the display. It’s something your OS knows, but your web browser doesn’t tell the website.

Also for those wondering how you can get subpixel AA on your canvases anyway: if you use a classic 2d rendering context (not WebGL), you can use canvas.getContext("2d", {alpha: false}) to create a canvas with a fully opaque background, which will also cause fillText to render with subpixel AA on most browsers.

What has good text rendering?

> And you can say what you want, the thing is damn snappy.

It's horribly slow on my computer, animations and scrolling happen at like 5fps. It also sends my cpu usage through the roof.

You have to activate hardware acceleration. And it will be the snappiest you ever saw.

ah, that did the trick. You're right, it really is snappy. Kind of crazy how smooth it is.

I think it's all WebGL UIs. Maybe somehow your WebGL gets simulated on the CPU?

Uh, what about accessibility?

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

Curious whether source maps and breakpoints still work?

Yes that's a possibility actually the experience should be even better than with sourcemapped JS. There was a demo of Wasm debugger on HN frontpage not a long time ago.

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