Raph Levien on UI Frameworks

00:00:00 Introductions
00:03:10 Introductions again
00:04:40 What came first: Inconsolata, RuneBender, Xi or Druid
00:10:30 Why are UI frameworks stuck
00:13:40 Electron is winning
00:15:00 DOM is good
00:17:50 DOM is bad
00:22:00 Performance in UI
00:24:00 Hot reload
00:25:00 Games vs UI
00:27:00 Fast compile tricks for Rust
00:27:40 On popularity of Clojure
00:30:00 Which Rust framework is winning
00:32:30 Makepad & immediate mode layouts
00:38:00 Abstacting away platform differences
00:43:45 Concurrent rendering
00:49:10 Performance again
00:57:20 Druid implementation
01:06:50 Better incrementality
01:13:00 Crochet
01:16:30 Async in UI
01:22:00 WebGPU
01:24:00 Unifying mobile and desktop
01:30:30 How to build vs What to build
01:35:00 Closing thoughts

[buck]

It's a damn shame the audio is quieter than the CMB (even with headphones @ max volume) and that the feed repeats so many times - would really enjoy being able to watch this.

[FinaISpartan]

I think one of the main issues regarding UI toolkit performance is the lack of apples to apples comparisons. There's no way to directly compare the performance of one framework to another. When TechEmpower made their WebFramework benchmark, it drove all web framework developers to push for performance so they don't end up on the bottom of the list. If we had something similar for UI toolkits, it would be much easier for toolkit developers to see areas in their framework that are lacking and improve upon them.

In the Linux community, people have always debated about GTK vs QT, and now even vs Electron, but the lack of good benchmarks still makes it hard to choose when trying to make a performance critical application. Again referring to the TechEmpower benchmark, when Rust's Actix framework was added, it was the fastest by a large margin. This alone was enough to drive people to try out Rust and Actix for their performance critical web servers.

Competition and constraints drive innovation more than almost anything, and I think that could be a huge key in fixing what's wrong with toolkit performance.

[Olivman]

01:13:00 The description for this timestamp is wrong. It's actually spelled "Crochet".

[kinleydorji]

Poor recording quality but still a great talk. Nikita, after Datascript and Rum, you cannot be allowed to use HUI. Please reconsider!

[Vlad-ortho]

Impossible to watch. Everything repeats at least twice. A glitch of recording.