Here at Dioxus Labs, we have an unofficial rule: only one rewrite per year.
Our last rewrite brought some amazing features: templates, hotreloading, and insane performance. However, don’t be mistaken, rewrites are scary, time consuming, and a huge gamble. We started this new rewrite on January 1st of 2024, completed it by Feburary 1st, and then spent another month and a half writing tests, squashing bugs, and polishing documentation. Rewrites are absolutely not for the faint of heart.
If you’re new here, Dioxus (dye•ox•us) is a library for building GUIs in Rust. Originally, I built Dioxus as a rewrite of Yew with the intention of supporting proper server-side-rendering. Eventually, Dioxus got popular, we got some amazing sponsors, and I went full time. We’ve grown from a team of 1 (me) to a team of 4(!) - pulled entirely from the wonderful dioxus community.
Now, Dioxus is something a little different. Real life, actual companies are shipping web apps, desktop apps, and mobile apps with Dioxus. What was once just a fun little side project powers a small fraction of apps out in the wild. We now have lofty goals of simplifying the entire app development ecosystem. Web, Desktop, Mobile, all end-to-end typesafe, blazing fast, living under one codebase. The dream!
With 0.5 we took a hard look at how Dioxus would need to change to achieve those goals. The request we got from the community was clear: make it simpler, make it robust, make it polished.
This is probably the biggest release of Dioxus ever, with so many new features, bug fixes, and improvements that I can’t list them all. We churned over 100,000 lines of code (yes, 100,000+) with over 1,400 commits between 0.4.3 and 0.5.0. Here’s a quick overview:
dioxus-core, removing all unsafe codeuse_state and use_ref for a clone-free Signal-based APIcx: Scope statelaunch function that starts your app for any platform