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109 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
109 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
# ezgui notes
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This is a GUI + 2D drawing + data viz library I've built up for A/B Street. I'm
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considering cleaning up the API surface and making it a proper standalone crate.
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## Running the demo
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[Example code](examples/demo.rs)
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```
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git clone https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet.git
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cd abstreet/ezgui
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cargo run --example demo
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```
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If you want a more thorough idea of what this crate can do, see
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[A/B Street](https://abstreet.org).
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## Features
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### Runs in lots of places
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Runs on Linux, Mac, Windows via [glium](https://github.com/glium/glium/). Also
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works in the browser using WebAssembly and
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[glow](https://github.com/grovesNL/glow/), but text support still coming in
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[a few months](https://github.com/RazrFalcon/resvg/issues/229).
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Why OpenGL? My requirements are super simple; I don't need the power of Vulkan
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or other new stuff. I want something simple that runs everywhere. If you want to
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make this work with WGPU or something else, it should be easy. The 3 backend
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implementations ([glium](src/backend_glium.rs),
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[glow on native](src/backend_glow.rs), [glow on wasm](src/backend_wasm.rs)) are
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each about 300 lines.
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### 2D drawing
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Everything is a colored polygon. Upload stuff once, redraw many times with a
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simple camera transform. Panning and smooth zooming. One extremely simple
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shader.
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Thanks to [usvg](https://github.com/RazrFalcon/resvg) and
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[lyon](https://github.com/nical/lyon/), SVGs and text are transformed into
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colored polygons. Programatically swap colors, rotate, scale stuff. Find bounds
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for precise mouseover.
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### GUI
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Widgets like buttons (with keybindings), checkboxes, sliders, pop-up menus, text
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entry, and some data viz things. You can combine these in `Composite`s to
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dispatch event handling and drawing. Styling (background colors, outline,
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padding) and Flexbox-ish layouting via
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[stretch](https://vislyhq.github.io/stretch/).
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The API / programming style is kind of funny; see the [demo](examples/demo.rs)
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to get a sense of it. No callbacks. You manually feed events into your
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`Composite`s of widgets and ask about what happened. There's no smart diffing of
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widget trees; most of the time it's fine to completely recreate a `Composite`
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from scratch when something changes, or replace a single widget in an existing
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`Composite`.
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(This is not a performance critical library. The perf bottlenecks in A/B Street
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are not in the GUI, and I probably won't invest much time speeding things up
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here until they are. (Or if somebody else winds up using this library and hits a
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problem.))
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### Data visualization
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Not exactly sure how this wound up in here too, but at some point I needed
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histograms and line plots that update live over time and show some info when you
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mouseover points, so here it is.
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## Big problems to solve before release
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When you ask a `Composite` what action happened (what button was clicked), it
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hands you back `Option<String>`. Not so typesafe. How boilerplatey is it to
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associate buttons with a user-provided enum?
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There are hardcoded colors / padding in lots of places. Need to make style
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easily configurable, with good defaults.
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The error handling is pretty bad; lots of unwraps and panics to clean up.
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## Why another Rust GUI library?
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When I started, nothing did what I needed, or it required awkward callbacks.
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Today, [iced](https://github.com/hecrj/iced) looks awesome, but wgpu doesn't
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work on my laptop. This is a dealbreaker -- I want to build stuff that runs
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~anywhere. I looked into adding an OpenGL backend, but the current structure of
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iced has a
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[huge](https://github.com/hecrj/iced/blob/master/native/src/renderer/null.rs)
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API surface to implement for a new backend.
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For the moment, I don't have enough time to get something else on-par with this
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library and port A/B Street over, so I'll continue to invest in this library. If
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there's lots of interest in other people using this library, I'll invest much
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more and make it a real contender.
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## Naming
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I never wanted to call this "ezgui." :(
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- coldbrew (stronger than iced coffee? ;) and what generally powers me )
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- allegro (where most pivotal meetings with my UX designer have happened, but
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this is also the name of some library)
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- coco (for the geom library)
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- abstgui (too obvious)
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