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I see. Thank you for the detailed information. I will read the linked content. I don't know if this is a good place to ask. But I was interested in wgpu becaus

I see. Thank you for the detailed information. I will read the linked content. I don't know if this is a good place to ask. But I was interested in wgpu because of the interest in building a cross-platform non-web UI library. I read a few of your articles and also looked at druid. I am pretty new to it and there seems to be no books on this topic. Do you have any recommendations?

raphlinus 5y ago
Yes: don't. It's very hard. More seriously. There is very good reason to be encouraged about wgpu as a cross-platform low-level GPU drawing interface for UI work. There are already successful UI toolkits using it, of which probably the most impressive is iced. For 2D graphics in general, a good starting point is Diego Nehab's 2D graphics course. It has links to a bunch of resources including papers on GPU rendering. Of course, I'm working on my own stuff, which in time I hope will become a very strong foundation for building things such as UI toolkits, but it's not ready yet, and of course you're already aware of it. [1]: http://w3.impa.br/~diego/teaching/vg/ http://w3.impa.br/~diego/teaching/vg/
- longstation 5y ago
  Saved in my note, much appreciated. Yes, I agree building a UI library from scratch is hard and probably not worthy doing (too many people tried and gave up in the middle; probably better to channel that enthusiasm on improving existing ones). I should state that more clearly. I was looking at something more modest, like a canvas implementation based on wgpu that enables others to build their UI libraries on top. I guess it would be something like Skia, but it also sounds like a tremendous effort, and I could probably just use Skia instead. However, I guess I am not going to match what Skia has (maybe what HTML canvas has is enough?). Also, I have played with skia-safe crate but I personally feel the dev experience could be better (not to blame skia-safe, it's wonderful and even provides a build process that automatically downloads a precompiled skia library). Thanks for pointing out Iced. I didn't know they are using wgpu under the hood. I will take a good look at their code. I have been reading nannou's code to learn how to work with wgpu. If we skip my last paragraph, I think building a UI library on top of nannou is pretty doable. [1]: https://github.com/nannou-org/nannou https://github.com/nannou-org/nannou

raphlinus 5y ago

Yes: don't. It's very hard. More seriously. There is very good reason to be encouraged about wgpu as a cross-platform low-level GPU drawing interface for UI work. There are already successful UI toolkits using it, of which probably the most impressive is iced. For 2D graphics in general, a good starting point is Diego Nehab's 2D graphics course. It has links to a bunch of resources including papers on GPU rendering. Of course, I'm working on my own stuff, which in time I hope will become a very strong foundation for building things such as UI toolkits, but it's not ready yet, and of course you're already aware of it. [1]: http://w3.impa.br/~diego/teaching/vg/ http://w3.impa.br/~diego/teaching/vg/

longstation 5y ago
Saved in my note, much appreciated. Yes, I agree building a UI library from scratch is hard and probably not worthy doing (too many people tried and gave up in the middle; probably better to channel that enthusiasm on improving existing ones). I should state that more clearly. I was looking at something more modest, like a canvas implementation based on wgpu that enables others to build their UI libraries on top. I guess it would be something like Skia, but it also sounds like a tremendous effort, and I could probably just use Skia instead. However, I guess I am not going to match what Skia has (maybe what HTML canvas has is enough?). Also, I have played with skia-safe crate but I personally feel the dev experience could be better (not to blame skia-safe, it's wonderful and even provides a build process that automatically downloads a precompiled skia library). Thanks for pointing out Iced. I didn't know they are using wgpu under the hood. I will take a good look at their code. I have been reading nannou's code to learn how to work with wgpu. If we skip my last paragraph, I think building a UI library on top of nannou is pretty doable. [1]: https://github.com/nannou-org/nannou https://github.com/nannou-org/nannou