Revery – Native, high-performance, cross-platform desktop apps

Much of the work put into Revery will also be applicable to other variations of it that can use platform components for the most important parts. See the Brisk project for an example that adheres to much of the same API and can target MacOS native platform components.

But also, take a look at VSCode, and Atom and notice how much of those applications are actually rebuilt skins from the ground up. Even the exit buttons in the Windows version are rebuilt from scratch, not using the platform "components".

The number of times I've ever heard anyone complain that VSCode reimplements clickable regions that look exactly the same on all platforms instead of using some ugly stock Windows buttons: zero.

Well the example application seemed fairly solid, well worthy of a screenshot. I would like something like this for some simpler custom tools every now and then.

It does seem to exhibit the usual custom rendered app issues. I suppose it is constantly redrawing the screen, as it seems to have constant cpu usage even when doing nothing, so not laptop friendly (though perhaps fixable still).

Some of the widget seem fairly arcane but usable. No keyboard control that I could find. Screens that needed to scroll didn't. Text input is custom, so that will be a source of frustration for many for a long time (lack of cursor control, IME, etc.), likely fine for internal tools for a while.

One thing that was very alien to me was the build tooling and language/runtime. It was easy enough to run the example per the readme instructions, but it is quite hidden what kind is the end product. I eventually found an actual executable of around 4MB (3.3MB stripped), but I'm not quite sure how self-contained that is. Also how easy would it be to link C/Rust lib, so that revery would only be used as the UI layer for something else.

> As a consequence, Revery is like flutter in that it does not use native widgets.

This puts a step above Electron, but one below wxWidgets in my hierarchy of cross-platform desktop frameworks. It really annoys me when frameworks pretend they are "native" (to separate themselves from Electron) but don't actually use native widgets. Sure, you might be getting a performance gain, but you're still losing on platform-specific behavior.

Qt is "semi-native" in the sense that it uses native components, but does so in a hackish, "lowest common denominator" way. It's better than the other alternatives you've mentioned.

Native? High-performance? Using Electron?! Something isn't right.