Druid

UNMAINTAINED

The Druid project has been discontinued.

New development effort moved on to Xilem, which has a lot of fundamental changes to allow for a wider variety of applications with better performance, but it also heavily inherits from Druid. We see Xilem as the future of Druid.

Introduction

Druid is a framework for building simple graphical applications.

Druid is composed of a number of related projects. druid-shell is a low-level library that provides a common abstraction for interacting with the current OS & window manager. piet is an abstraction for doing 2D graphics; kurbo is a library for 2D geometry; and druid itself is an opinionated set of high-level APIs for building cross-platform desktop applications.

The framework is data oriented. It shares many ideas (and is directly inspired by) contemporary declarative UI frameworks such as Flutter, Jetpack Compose, and SwiftUI, while also attempting to be conceptually simple and largely non-magical. A programmer familiar with Rust should be able to understand how Druid works without special difficulty.

Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes basic familiarity with Rust and a working setup with the basic tooling like Rustup and Cargo. This tutorial will use stable Rust (v1.65.0 at the time of writing) and the latest released version of Druid (v0.8).

Key Concepts

• the Data trait: How you represent your application model.
• the Widget trait: How you represent your UI.
• the Lens trait: How you associate parts of your model with parts of your UI.