Quarve

Quarve is in pre-alpha. Use at your own risk

Quarve is an experimental rust UI library for desktop applications. It was made to develop Monocurl, a mathematical animation app, but can be used more generally.

Example

Button and counter example. For fully running examples, please check out the git repository.

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
fn counter(s: MSlock) -> impl IVP {
    // state
    let count = Store::new(0);
    let count_binding = count.binding();
    let count_label = count.map(|c| format!("Count: {:?}", c), s);

    // views
    let button = button("Increment", move |s| {
        count_binding.apply(NumericAction::Incr(1), s);
    });
    let display = Text::from_signal(count_label);

    vstack()
        .push(button.bold())
        .push(display)
        .text_color(BLACK)
        .frame(F.intrinsic(400, 400).unlimited_stretch())
        .background(WHITE)
}
}

Preview

Installation

After installing cargo, run

cargo install quarve_cli

You can then create a Quarve project with the command quarve new <name>.

For certain OSes, you may have to perform additional steps. See setup for relevant information.

Run the project either by running it as a normal rust binary or by using quarve run.

Design Principles

We designed Quarve to satisfy the core principles:

1. Multithreaded Quarve extends rust's fearless concurrency to multithreaded app development.
2. Declarative We aim to make the syntax of Quarve convenient to read, without overly relying on macros. Quarve also follows the pattern of composability, allowing for reusable and easy-to-understand code.
3. Rust-first As opposed to being a port of a UI library designed for another language, Quarve is built around the features that define Rust: monomorphism, thread safety, composition, speed, and more.
4. Native Quarve views are native-backed, avoiding web browsers and gpu renderers. This allows for small installation size and memory footprint.
5. Fast We do not use virtual doms and aim for minimal overheard compared to a fully native application (there is still some work to do).

Currently, Quarve is implemented for macOS, Windows and Linux. There are many features that are yet to be added, but the basics are implemented.

Learning

This book is split into several sections. Rather than reading each section completely one-by-one, we recommend skimming each section until you have an intution of how that part of Quarve works and returning whenever you need to reference details. Nevertheless, make sure to follow along by coding examples!

Documentation is available at docs.rs.

For further learning, we recommend looking through the Monocurl source code as it is the most complex application using Quarve. Simpler examples can be found in the git repository. Otherwise, feel free to ask for help in the Discord server.

Feature State

Here are my personal thoughts about some of the features of Quarve. Remember that this is a work-in-progress crate and should not be considered production ready.

Implemented in an elegant manner

• Layout
• State (some small things to change)
• Undo/Redo
• Environments
• Modifiers

Implemented but minor annoyances

• Event handling
• Textview
• Window and View customization
• Menus

Implemented but major annoyances

• Focusing views
• Many arbitrary controls (e.g. slides) are missing

Not Yet Implemented

• Vector graphics rendering
• Video/audio support
• Many details are missing