Hello HN!

We’re happy to finally announce our first public release of Makepad.

Makepad is a UI framework written in Rust. It’s designed for performance — relying almost solely on the GPU for rendering. It features a novel styling system, based on the idea of using shaders to adjust the look and feel of your application. To this end, it also features a custom DSL, including a shader language that compiles to multiple graphics backends.

A major feature of Makepad’s DSL is real-time UI editing: Makepad apps listen for changes to their DSL source code and update themselves at runtime to reflect the new code. This allows developers to adjust the layout and style of their app without having to do an expensive recompilation step on each change.

Makepad currently works on all major native platforms (OS X, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android) as well as the web (via WASM builds).

This is an early release — lots of core stuff works, and you can build real apps with Makepad today. In fact, there are some real apps being built with Makepad today:

- Robrix, a Rust Matrix client https://github.com/project-robius/robrix - Moly, a Rust AI LLM client https://github.com/moxin-org/moly

To get a better overview of what Makepad can do, you might also want to check out our UI zoo (currently desktop only): https://makepad.nl/makepad-example-ui-zoo/index.html

That said, there are still some rough edges and missing bits. Looking forward, our intent is to start releasing regularly from now on, so Makepad will only become better over time.

Check it out and let us know what you think!

crates.io: https://crates.io/crates/makepad-widgets github.com: https://github.com/makepad/makepad website: https://makepad.nl