Item — HN Reader

Thanks! To clarify, the platform abstractions are both in piet, which is 2D drawing, and also in druid-shell, which contains a wide range of other things, including menus, copy-paste, and a good start on IME.

I've written lots about Druid. I haven't really chimed in much in this thread, as a lot of the discussion is frankly not that relevant to what we're trying to do. We are currently not focused on making a good out-of-the-box developer experience, which is what most people here seem to be looking for. Rather, we're systematically exploring what it takes to make a good next-generation UI toolkit, and building a knowledge community around that. It turns out there's quite a bit to that, much more than building a toy UI toolkit.

1 comments

Interesting. What would you say separates a toy toolkit from a “professional” toolkit?

For starters, real text handling. Just doing a full text widget with all the trimmings is quite complex problem. Druid has made good progress on this front but is nowhere near where it should be. I also put IME in this category.

As mentioned elsewhere, accessibility. Aside from web technology, Qt is one of the very few cross-platform toolkits that gets this right. I'm happy to see that some other projects, egui in particular, are starting to pay attention.

One of the things that Druid doesn't do well right now is integration with 3D and video content. That will depend on the application (it's not needed for font editing), but is definitely needed for a toolkit to be considered general purpose. The implications go deep, mostly because you have to hook pretty deep into the system compositor to do this well.

I may do a blog post on these infrastructure topics, depending on interest.