Dioxus: A concurrent, functional, virtual DOM for Rust

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 used to crafting 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 never be burdened with context switching between various programming languages, build tools, and environment idiosyncrasies.

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.

• Testing, development, and packaging tools for Dioxus apps
• Redux-style global state management
• Recoil-style global state management
• Hybrid apps (SSR + Web)
• Live view
• Desktop Applications
• iOS apps
• Android apps
• 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. If using the functional component macro, it's possible to inline props into the function definition itself.

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

// or

#[functional_component]
static Example: FC<{ name: String }> = |ctx| 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, or templating engine. Work is being done on a terra template processor for existing templates.

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 diopack to build and test webapps. 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/diopack will get it installed.

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
• simple_wasm: Simple WASM app that says hello. diopack develop --example simple

Documentation

We have a pretty robust