🌗🚀 Dioxus

A concurrent, functional, virtual DOM for Rust

About

Dioxus is a new approach for creating performant cross platform user experiences in Rust. In Dioxus, the UI is represented as a tree of Virtual Nodes not bound to any specific renderer. Instead, external renderers can leverage Dioxus' virtual DOM and event system as a source of truth for rendering to a medium of their choice. Developers experienced with building react-based experiences should feel comfortable with Dioxus.

Dioxus is unique in the space of UI for Rust. Dioxus supports a renderer approach called "broadcasting" where two VDoms with separate renderers can sync their UI states remotely. Our goal as a framework is to work towards "Dioxus Liveview" where a server and client work in tandem, eliminating the need for frontend-specific APIs altogether.

Features

Dioxus' goal is to be the most advanced UI system for Rust, targeting isomorphism and hybrid approaches. Our goal is to eliminate context-switching for cross-platform development - both in UI patterns and programming language. Hooks and components should work everywhere without compromise.

Dioxus Core supports:

• Hooks
• Concurrent rendering
• Context subscriptions
• State management integrations

On top of these, we have several projects you can find in the packages folder.

• dioxus-cli: Testing, development, and packaging tools for Dioxus apps
• dioxus-router: A hook-based router implementation for Dioxus web apps
• dioxus-vscode: Syntax highlighting, code formatting, and hints for Dioxus html! blocks
• redux-rs: Redux-style global state management
• recoil-rs: Recoil-style global state management
• dioxus-iso: Hybrid apps (SSR + Web)
• dioxus-live: Live view
• dioxus-webview: Desktop Applications
• dioxus-ios: iOS apps
• dioxus-android: Android apps
• dioxus-magic: AR/VR Apps

Hello World

Dioxus should look and feel just like writing functional React components. In Dioxus, there are no class components with lifecycles. All state management is done via hooks. This encourages logic reusability and lessens the burden on Dioxus to maintain a non-breaking lifecycle API.

#[derive(Properties, PartialEq)]
struct MyProps {
    name: String
}

fn Example(ctx: &Context<MyProps>) -> VNode {
    html! { <div> "Hello {ctx.props.name}!" </div> }
}

Here, the Context object is used to access hook state, create subscriptions, and interact with the built-in context API. Props, children, and component APIs are accessible via the Context object. The functional component macro makes life more productive by inlining props directly as function arguments, similar to how Rocket parses URIs.

// A very terse component!
#[fc]
fn Example(ctx: &Context, name: String) -> VNode {
    html! { <div> "Hello {name}!" </div> }
}

// or

#[functional_component]
static Example: FC = |ctx, name: String| html! { <div> "Hello {:?name}!" </div> }; 

The final output of components must be a tree of VNodes. We provide an html macro for using JSX-style syntax to write these, though, you could use any macro, DSL, templating engine, or the constructors directly.

Concurrency

Dioxus, using React as a reference, provides the ability to have asynchronous components. With Dioxus, this is a valid component:

async fn user_data(ctx: &Context<()>) -> VNode {
    let Profile { name, birthday, .. } = use_context::<UserContext>(ctx).fetch_data().await;
    html! {
        <div>
            {"Hello, {:?name}!"}
            {if birthday === std::Instant::now() {html! {"Happy birthday!"}}}
        </div>
    }
}

Asynchronous components are powerful but can also be easy to misuse as they pause rendering for the component and its children. Refer to the concurrent guide for information on how to best use async components.

Examples

We use the dedicated dioxus-cli to build and test dioxus web-apps. This can run examples, tests, build web workers, launch development servers, bundle, and more. It's general purpose, but currently very tailored to Dioxus for liveview and bundling. If you've not used it before, cargo install --path pacakages/dioxus-cli will get it installed. This CLI tool should feel like using cargo but with 1st party support for assets, bundling, and other important dioxus-specific features.

Alternatively, trunk works but can't run examples.

• tide_ssr: Handle an HTTP request and return an html body using the html! macro. cargo run --example tide_ssr
• doc_generator: Use dioxus ssr to generate the website and docs. cargo run --example doc_generator
• fc_macro: Use the functional component macro to build terse components. cargo run --example fc_macro
• hello_web: Start a simple wasm app. Requires a webpacker like dioxus-cli or trunk cargo run --example hello
• router: cargo run --example router
• tide_ssr: cargo run --example tide_ssr
• webview: Use liveview to bridge into a webview context for a simple desktop application. cargo run --example webview
• twitter-clone: A full-featured Twitter clone showcasing dioxus-liveview, state management patterns, and hooks. cargo run --example twitter

Documentation

We have a pretty robust