Going full time

Jan 5, 2023

@jkelleyrtp

Hey folks, we’re going to deviate from the typical release post or technical discussion and talk about the future of Dioxus. If you’re new here, Dioxus is a UI library for Rust that supports web, desktop, mobile, liveview, TUI, and more. Our goal is to simplify app development, combining projects like React, Electron, Flutter, NextJS, InkJS, and Phoenix under one unified stack.

I’m happy to announce that I’m now working on Dioxus Labs full time. Thanks to the generous support of Futurewei, Satellite.im, the GitHub Accelerator program, and several amazing individuals, Dioxus Labs is now able to employ both myself and top contributors like ealmloff full time.

Over the past year, Dioxus has grown significantly. We’ve made huge strides in pushing forward the Rust frontend ecosystem. Some of the amazing innovations in this space include hot-reloading, syn-based autoformatting, and dioxus-liveview. Built on top of these innovations are breakthrough projects like Sledgehammer, Taffy, Freya, and Blitz. We want to continue innovating while also maturing Dioxus on all fronts.

Going full time on open source is a huge jump. It takes a lot of courage to leave a company as great as Cloudflare. Being independent truly means independent - no work colleagues, no free snacks, no transit card, no beautiful office, and no company-sponsored health insurance. That being said, I’m eternally grateful to have the opportunity to pursue Dioxus Labs with my entire passion. We are committed to helping developers build better apps.

We have big plans for the future. Here’s a rough sketch of what the future holds for Dioxus:

• Massively overhauled docs with tutorial videos and one-click-deploy example projects
• Stable support for async components, suspense boundaries, and error boundaries
• Stable release of Blitz (our HTML/CSS renderer built on Vello) with an open API
• A deployment and release management platform for Dioxus-based apps
• An overhaul of the Dioxus Router with support for many NextJS features
• A standard library of cross-platform functionality (GPS/notifications)
• Better DevTool including VirtualDom visualization, live state inspection, and visual editing
• Support for panic recovery and bundle splitting in rustc for wasm32-unknown-unknown

There’s a lot more on the roadmap. If you’re at all interested in contributing to Dioxus, let us know in the community discord, and we’ll be there to help. If you’re interested in supporting the project to help us grow, please reach out.

Again, a huge thanks to our wonderful sponsors and an even bigger thanks to the Rust community who have used and contributed to Dioxus over the past year.

Yours truly,

Jonathan Kelley