Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

I've been interested in Dioxus, Leptos, egui, etc. for awhile, but I have to admit I don't know the technical workings of the framework.

On desktop/mobile, does Dioxus run as a native app? Is it an immediate mode renderer like egui? How do you style it? Or is it JavaScript + webview/electron?

On the web does it run as a WASM binary against a canvas renderer, or is it write to DOM? How does it talk to the DOM? WASM, JavaScript transpilation, etc.?

Can you do multithreading on web with web workers? Is the async story good? HTTP/gRPC clients?

Do you have to build your entire app in Dioxus, or can you incorporate other web (eg. React) apps? Can it talk to JavaScript?

How solid is the API now? Is it going to change a lot in the near future?

Do you think it'd be trivial to stuff a Bevy game inside of a Dioxus shell? We've thought it might be easier to prototype the UX outside the engine, especially since web is a deployment target.

How big is the community?

Looking into this for a project soon, so if any of the Dioxus devs can answer some of this, I'd super appreciate it. (Sorry for all the questions which may already be answered in the FAQ/docs.)

Dioxus is similar to modern React Native in architecture. Your rust code is running natively and you can call into JNI and Objective-C freely without a VM in your way.

It’s retained mode and stays close to the architecture of a React/Svelte app.

On the web, it talks DOM directly. We have SSR, hydration, streaming HTML, and a fullstack nextjs-esque framework to go with it. All done via webassembly.

The async story is great. Our state management is multithreaded and many users are using web workers and PWAs.

We have focused less on building a good multi-tenant story but you can definitely integrate React into Dioxus and Dioxus into React. We’re close to runtime compatible but React core is a shifting foundation to build on.

The API feels closer to solid now but the scope of the project is big and APIs are bound to change. This update, we changed a few things but upgrading is quick. It will be a while before we want to rework interfaces again, and we’ll likely provide codemods at that point.

I think the community is quite large (gaining critical mass for library support) picking up steam, but JS land certainly is going to be much bigger.

> Dioxus is similar to modern React Native in architecture. Your rust code is running natively and you can call into JNI and Objective-C freely without a VM in your way.

Given the similarity, would it be feasible to add a compatibility layer to bring in React Native Turbo Modules? (Fabric support would be unlikely I'd imagine)

I looked at rewriting a canvas + loads of HTML, tables etc. game in Bevy with egui. Most of the things you mentioned were trivial, async RPC queries with callbacks, all of that worked fine out-of-the-box.

The sticky parts were where I needed more complex UI functionality. In the web world you can leverage mature, albeit heavy libraries for graphs and tables. In pure egui, you often need to roll your own and extend the basic features. Depending on how far you go down this road, it may make more sense to work within Bevy's UI entirely.

Dioxus looks like an interesting alternative here, but it also seems to be even heavier than egui, which isn't exactly a lite dependency.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com