Dioxus is a recently-released library for building interactive user interfaces (GUI) with Rust. It is built around a Virtual DOM, making it portable for the web, desktop, server, mobile, and more. Dioxus looks and feels just like React, so if you know React, then you'll feel right at home.
When Dioxus was initially released, we had very simple support for logging Dioxus elements out as TUI elements. In the past month or so, [@Demonthos](https://github.com/Demonthos) really stepped up and made the new crate a reality.
[Imgur](https://imgur.com/GL7uu3r)
The new TUI renderer even supports mouse movements, keyboard input, async tasks, borders, and a ton more.
We totally revamped the router, switching away from the old yew-router approach to the more familiar [React-Router](http://reactrouter.com). It's less type-safe but provides more flexibility and support for beautiful URLs.
Apps with routers are *really* simple now. It's easy to compose the "Router", a "Route", and "Links" to define how your app is laid out:
Managing state in your app can be challenging. Building global state management solutions can be even more challenging. For the first big attempt at building a global state management solution for Dioxus, we chose to keep it simple and follow in the footsteps of the [Recoil.JS](http://recoiljs.org) project.
Fermi uses the concept of "Atoms" for global state. These individual values can be get/set from anywhere in your app. Using state with Fermi is basically as simple as `use_state`.
```rust
// Create a single value in an "Atom"
static TITLE: Atom<&str> = |_| "Hello";
// Read the value from anywhere in the app, subscribing to any changes
For internal components, explicitly declaring props structs can become tedious. That's why we've built the new `inline_props` macro. This macro lets you inline your props definition right into your component function arguments.
Simply add the `inline_props` macro to your component:
```rust
#[inline_props]
fn Child<'a>(
cx: Scope,
name: String,
age: String,
onclick: EventHandler<'a, ClickEvent>
) -> Element {
cx.render(rsx!{
button {
"Hello, {name}"
"You are {age} years old"
onclick: move |evt| onclick.call(evt)
}
})
}
```
You won't be able to document each field or attach attributes so you should refrain on using it in libraries.
## Props optional fields
Sometimes you don't want to specify *every* value on a component's props, since there might a lot. That's why the `Props` macro now supports optional fields. You can use a combination of `default`, `strip_option`, and `optional` to tune the exact behavior of properties fields.
```rust
#[derive(Props, PartialEq)]
struct ChildProps {
#[props(default = "client")]
name: String,
#[props(default)]
age: Option<u32>,
#[props(optional)]
age: Option<u32>,
}
// then to use the accompanying component
rsx!{
Child {
name: "asd",
}
}
```
## Dioxus Web Speed Boost
We've changed how DOM patching works in Dioxus-Web; now, all of the DOM manipulation code is written in TypeScript and shared between our web, desktop, and mobile runtimes.
On an M1-max, the "create-rows" operation used to take 45ms. Now, it takes a mere 17ms - 3x faster than React. We expect an upcoming optimization to bring this number as low as 3ms.
Under the hood, we have a new string interning engine to cache commonly used tags and values on the Rust <-> JS boundary, resulting in significant performance improvements.
Overall, Dioxus apps are even more snappy than before.
To make life easier and improve your development experience, we've launched the first iteration of the official Dioxus VSCode extension. If you're not using VSCode, you can still take advantage of these new features through the CLI tool.
Included in the new extension is:
- Auto-formatting of `rsx!` blocks
- Convert selection of HTML to RSX
- Extract RSX as component
[To install the extension, go here](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=matklad.rust-analyzer).
The VSCode extension is really easy to contribute to and has tons of potential. This is a great place to start contributing to the Dioxus project *and* improve your development experience.
## CLI Tool
Thanks to the amazing work by [@mrxiaozhuox](https://github.com/mrxiaozhuox), our CLI tool is fixed and working better than ever. The Dioxus-CLI sports a new development server, an HTML to RSX translation engine, a `cargo fmt`-style command, a configuration scheme, and much more.
Unlike its counterpart, `Trunk.rs`, the dioxus-cli supports running examples and tests, making it easier to test web-based projects and showcase web-focused libraries.
