This Month in Xilem, May 2024

Daniel McNab, June 12, 2024

Several members of Linebender attended RustNL at the start of May. Raph gave a talk titled Xilem: Let's Build High Performance Rust UI (YouTube). The conference also provided a great opportunity to meet with developers from other Rust user interface projects; Olivier has produced a report on the unconference, which will be published here shortly. In addition, those in attendance met after the conference and worked on a roadmap for Linebender, which we are also planning to share here.

We have taken several important steps on Xilem. At the start of the month, we released Xilem 0.1.0 and Masonry 0.2.0. This is the first published release of Xilem, and includes text input (xilem#241), AccessKit integration (xilem#244) and a TodoMVC inspired example (xilem#257). Work through the rest of the month included explorations of a generic View trait (xilem#310), and an Android port (xilem#309, xilem#313). rfcs#6 is designed to reduce boilerplate when using Masonry, which should help those creating custom Masonry widgets.

Other Linebender projects have seen steady improvements. vello#575 significantly reduced shader compilation time at startup for projects using Vello, and vello#516 enabled clearer error handling. Nico Burns has started an exciting project for inline box layout (parley#67), which will enable Parley to be used in projects which must implement Web layout.