Kano

Yet another experimental, work-in-progress GUI application framework written for and in Rust.

It's a fine-grained reactivity architecture that is explicitly platform agnostic and component-library-first.

Kano elevates component libraries to act as the main platform abstraction.

Hello world!

use kano::prelude::app::*;

/// Two important definitions are generated here:
/// `AppPlatform` is a type alias for the current platform.
/// `View` is a trait that all views of this application must implement.
kano::define_platform!(AppPlatform, View);

fn main() {
    kano::init::<AppPlatform>().run_app(HelloWorld).unwrap();
}

fn HelloWorld() -> impl View {
    "Hello world!"
}

Trying out the Web platform

cargo install trunk

(cd examples/demo/; trunk serve --watch ../.. --features web)

kano-basic-components

This is a very basic platform-agnostic UI component library.

Reactivity

Kano will use a reactivity architecture inspired by https://docs.rs/leptos_reactive/latest/leptos_reactive/.

It works by always evaluating subcribers from within Rust closures while a context is stored in a thread local. When the subscriber is read the first time, a reactive relationship is automatically registered between the reactive view and the subscriber (a "subscription").

Templating language

Let's use audunhalland/hypp as inspiration.

This is a markup templating DSL that merges web markup and Rust. We can just reuse part of its implementation. Kano will use a much simpler desugaring than hypp, since the intermediate language (Rust) is already a declarative expression that is view-tree-structured.

In this DSL, string literals are always "quoted", so that language keywords are available without any escaping (.e.g. if, for, match).

Acknowledgements

This project builds on a lot of ideas from great people.

• leptos
• xilem
• svelte
• hypp

lib.rs:

Kano is a work-in-progress GUI application framework written for and in Rust.