abstreet/widgetry

widgetry notes

Rustwarts School of Glitchcraft and Widgetry.

This is a GUI + 2D drawing + data viz library I've built up for A/B Street. I'm considering cleaning up the API surface and making it a proper standalone crate.

Running the demo

Because of wasm-pack issues, normal Rust example binaries don't work. The example code is instead in the widgetry_demo crate.

git clone https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet.git
cd abstreet/widgetry_demo
cargo run

# Or for web
cd abstreet/widgetry_demo
./run_web.sh

If you want a more thorough idea of what this crate can do, see A/B Street.

Features

Runs in lots of places

Runs on Linux, Mac, Windows via glow. Also works in the browser using WebAssembly, but text support still coming in a few months.

Why OpenGL? My requirements are super simple; I don't need the power of Vulkan or other new stuff. I want something simple that runs everywhere. If you want to make this work with WGPU or something else, it should be easy. The backends are a few hundred lines -- Glow running either on native or on wasm.

2D drawing

Everything is a colored polygon. Upload stuff once, redraw many times with a simple camera transform. Panning and smooth zooming. One extremely simple shader.

Thanks to usvg and lyon, SVGs and text are transformed into colored polygons. Programatically swap colors, rotate, scale stuff. Find bounds for precise mouseover.

GUI

Widgets like buttons (with keybindings), checkboxes, sliders, pop-up menus, text entry, and some data viz things. You can combine these in Panels to dispatch event handling and drawing. Styling (background colors, outline, padding) and Flexbox-ish layouting via stretch.

The API / programming style is kind of funny; see the demo to get a sense of it. No callbacks. You manually feed events into your Panels of widgets and ask about what happened. There's no smart diffing of widget trees; most of the time it's fine to completely recreate a Panel from scratch when something changes, or replace a single widget in an existing Panel.

(This is not a performance critical library. The perf bottlenecks in A/B Street are not in the GUI, and I probably won't invest much time speeding things up here until they are. (Or if somebody else winds up using this library and hits a problem.))

Data visualization

Not exactly sure how this wound up in here too, but at some point I needed histograms and line plots that update live over time and show some info when you mouseover points, so here it is.

Big problems to solve before release

When you ask a Panel what action happened (what button was clicked), it hands you back Option<String>. Not so typesafe. How boilerplatey is it to associate buttons with a user-provided enum?

There are hardcoded colors / padding in lots of places. Need to make style easily configurable, with good defaults.

The error handling is pretty bad; lots of unwraps and panics to clean up.

Why another Rust GUI library?

When I started, nothing did what I needed, or it required awkward callbacks. Today, iced looks awesome, but wgpu doesn't work on my laptop. This is a dealbreaker -- I want to build stuff that runs ~anywhere. I looked into adding an OpenGL backend, but the current structure of iced has a huge API surface to implement for a new backend.

For the moment, I don't have enough time to get something else on-par with this library and port A/B Street over, so I'll continue to invest in this library. If there's lots of interest in other people using this library, I'll invest much more and make it a real contender.

Future work

• Draggable panels