Let's put together a simple "hello world" to get acquainted with Dioxus. The Dioxus-CLI has an equivalent to "create-react-app" built-in, but setting up Dioxus apps is simple enough to not need additional tooling.
First, let's start a new project. Rust has the concept of executables and libraries. Executables have a `main.rs` and libraries have `lib.rs`. A project may have both. Our `hello world` will be an executable - we expect our app to launch when we run it! Cargo provides this for us:
```shell
$ cargo new --bin hello-dioxus
```
Now, we can `cd` into our project and poke around:
```shell
$ cd hello-dioxus
$ tree
.
├── Cargo.toml
├── .git
├── .gitignore
└── src
└── main.rs
```
We are greeted with a pre-initialized git repository, our code folder (`src`) and our project file (`Cargo.toml`).
Our `src` folder holds our code. Our `main.rs` file holds our `fn main` which will be executed when our app is ran.
```shell
$ more src/main.rs
```
```rust
fn main() {
println!("Hello, world!");
}
```
Right now, whenever our app is launched, "Hello world" will be echoed to the terminal.
```shell
$ cargo run
Compiling hello-dioxus v0.1.0
Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.41s
Running `target/debug/hello-dioxus`
Hello, world!
```
Our `Cargo.toml` file holds our dependencies and project flags.
```shell
$ cat Cargo.toml
```
```toml
[package]
name = "hello-dioxus"
version = "0.1.0"
edition = "2018"
# See more keys and their definitions at https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/manifest.html
[dependencies]
```
To use the Dioxus library, we'll want to add the most recent version of `Dioxus` to our crate. If you have `cargo edit` installed, simply call:
```shell
$ cargo add dioxus --features web
```
It's very important to add `dioxus` with the `web` feature for this example. The `dioxus` crate is a batteries-include crate that combines a bunch of utility crates together, ensuring compatibility of the most important parts of the ecosystem. Under the hood, the `dioxus` crate configures various renderers, hooks, debug tooling, and more. The `web` feature ensures the we only depend on the smallest set of required crates to compile.
If you plan to develop extensions for the `Dioxus` ecosystem, please use `dioxus-core` crate. The `dioxus` crate re-exports `dioxus-core` alongside other utilties. As a result, `dioxus-core` is much more stable than the batteries-included `dioxus` crate.
This bit of code imports everything from the the `prelude` module. This brings into scope the right traits, types, and macros needed for working with Dioxus.
```rust
use diouxs::prelude::*;
```
This bit of code starts the WASM renderer as a future (JS Promise) and then awaits it. This is very similar to the `ReactDOM.render()` method you use for a React app. We pass in the `App` function as a our app.
```rust
fn main() {
dioxus::web::start(App)
}
```
Finally, our app. Every component in Dioxus is a function that takes in a `Context` object and returns a `VNode`.
In React, you'll save data between renders with hooks. However, hooks rely on global variables which make them difficult to integrate in multi-tenant systems like server-rendering. In Dioxus, you are given an explicit `Context` object to control how the component renders and stores data.
Next, we're greeted with the `rsx!` macro. This lets us add a custom DSL for declaratively building the structure of our app. The semantics of this macro are similar to that of JSX and HTML, though with a familiar Rust-y interface. The `html!` macro is also available for writing components with a JSX/HTML syntax.
