Bay Area Rust May 2023: Raph Levien on Xilem Vector Graphics

Discover the innovative Xilem Vector Graphics framework at Bay Area Rust May 2023, exploring its declarative UI, type system, view tree, and reactivity, and learn about its benefits, challenges, and performance.

Key takeaways
  • Declarative UI: Xylem provides a new way of building UIs that focuses on the declaration of what the UI should look like, rather than how to render it.
  • Type System: Xylem uses Rust’s type system to ensure that UI components are properly written and that errors are caught at compile-time.
  • View Tree: Xylem’s view tree is a data structure that represents the UI components and their relationships.
  • Element Tree: Xylem’s element tree is an associated type of the view tree, representing the actual DOM elements.
  • Reactivity: Xylem provides a reactivity model that allows UI components to be updated automatically when their dependencies change.
  • Benefits: Xylem’s declarative approach and type system provide benefits such as better performance, easier debugging, and improved code quality.
  • Comparison to other UI libraries: Xylem is compared to other UI libraries such as SwiftUI, React, and Elm, and is found to have a unique approach to building UIs.
  • Challenges: Xylem faces challenges such as compile-time errors, mutable state, and diffing between view trees.
  • Performance: Xylem’s performance is a focus area, with the goal of achieving fast build and deploy times.
  • Web and Native: Xylem can be used to build UIs for both the web and native platforms.
  • Rust Implementations: There are multiple Rust implementations of the Xylem pattern, including Sycamore, Leptos, and Silicon Web.