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We already had Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX and now Flutter (with Wasm). How is Pax better than them?
by niutech 2y ago
We already had Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX and now Flutter (with Wasm). How is Pax better than them?
- zackbrown 2y agoI won't claim Pax is better than any of these, but that we seek to solve different goals. Unlike Flash: driven by a markup language, fully open source, no plugin required, solves a11y, compiles to native apps incl. mobile Unlike Silverlight: fully open source, no plugin required, no heavy VM Unlike JavaFX: no plugin required, no heavy VM, visual builder is a vector design tool Unlike Flutter: designed for web (small footprint, a11y out of the box); first-party and foundationally integrated visual builder, visual builder is a vector design tool
- niutech 2y agoThanks for explanations. However, instead of making yet another framework, wouldn't it be better to contribute to Flutter (e.g. optimize its wasm target, add a vector visual builder), so there is one strong open cross-platform alternative to HTML/CSS/JS?
- zackbrown 2y agoPax's primary goal is "designability" — to enable a vector design tool to read & write the same content & behavior you may write by hand. (.pax files) Our solution requires language constraints — a hermetic separation of concerns between the declarative description language (.pax) and a Turing-complete programming language (starting with Rust.) These language constraints and rendering requirements[0] are so core to our solution that building anywhere other than the systems level was not tenable. [0] Specifically, the runtime must render in "design tool coordinates," to enable a vector design tool authoring UX. This authoring experience must also be extremely fast, like Figma's. The rendering engine must be designed around this requirement and neither HTML/CSS's or Flutter's were.