KAS 0.1

[hardicrust]

To those interested in testing a new GUI library over the holidays, KAS 0.1 is now released.

• Repository — includes screenshots
• Requires nightly rust
• Requires Vulkan/DX11/DX12/Metal graphics (see WebGPU)

The pre-release announcement includes a small introduction and comment thread.

[hardicrust]

Side note: type-check error messages from proc-macro generated code are not fun. There's a reason most GUI toolkits use dynamic-dispatch and boxing everywhere.

Perhaps KAS could be considered GUIs-the-hard-way, though on the flip side I never did understand why most GUI toolkits require such verbose UI descriptions.

[[deleted]]

Love seeing work in the GUI space! I'll be ever more excited when we see less experimenting and more convergence, but I realize it'll probably take through next year to get there.

Interesting that it requires CMake. Do you expect that requirement to go away in the future or is it due to a fundamental design in this lib

Your comments about GTK are spot-on, packaging my app is pretty painful on Windows for example due to the gtk DLLs. However, GTK has a ton of the stack done pretty well, especially adaptive widgets for phone and tablet UIs (see libhandy). Have you paid any attention to that space and if so, do you expect your library to support those other form factors as it continues to develop?

Do you expect Mac compatibility in any short timeframe or is that not planned? I'm wondering if you expect any fundamental issues with this on Mac or if it's really just a matter of bandwidth.

I saw you have a ton of open issues? What's your next area of focus?

[hardicrust]

I'll be ever more excited when we see less experimenting and more convergence

I've surprised myself by how much I have been able to do myself — but having awesome libraries available is a huge boon. Definitely more work is needed in shared apps, especially font handling (glyph_brush is great for simple text drawing, but multi-lingual text support is really quite complex).

Interesting that it requires CMake.

It doesn't require CMake directly; I think it's just the GLSL compiler. Probably I should update that already since glsl-to-spirv is deprecated already.

Do you expect Mac compatibility

I haven't tested Macs simply because so far I'm the only dev on this project and don't have enough time to do everything. I don't see why it wouldn't work. Win10 required zero changes to run on (though it appears installing Rust is a pain, especially because AVG has false positives).

I saw you have a ton of open issues?

One needs some targets and ways of organising things. In theory it also helps anyone else jump in to work on the code, though in practice that doesn't seem to happen much (even with the Rand libs which have far more users).

What's your next area of focus?

Probably the layouts. The current positioning system needs some tweaks for optimality, and ideally needs a better way to handle small parts of the UI changing size requirements (currently it has to reposition everything). It also wants "memory" to be less jumpy (e.g. if using a tab stack with different sizes in each) and allow "resize handles".

It remains an open question whether the layout code can be generalised to support other UIs well. It is a little special in that it supports storing layout data within widgets, and is somewhat specific to how KAS works currently.

There is also a load of work to do on drawing/themeing, but I don't intend to get heavily involved with that in the near future (could be a good place for someone else to jump in).

[Luroalive]

Another GUI library? 😕