Azul - Desktop GUI framework

WARNING: The features advertised in this README may not work yet.

Azul is a free, functional, reactive GUI framework for Rust and C++, built using the WebRender rendering engine and a CSS / HTML-like document object model for rapid development of beautiful, native desktop applications

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About

Azul is a library for creating graphical user interfaces in Rust and C. It mixes paradigms from functional, reactive and data-oriented programming with an API suitable for developing cross-platform desktop applications. The two core principles of Azul is to not render objects that aren't visible and to use composition of DOM trees over inheritance.

Azul separates the concerns of business logic / callbacks, data model and UI rendering / styling by not letting the UI / rendering logic have mutable access to the application data. In Azul, rendering the view is a pure function that maps your application data to a styled DOM. "Widgets" are just functions that render a certain state, more complex widgets use function composition.

Since recreating DOM objects is expensive (note: "expensive" = 3 milliseconds), Azul caches the DOM object and does NOT recreate it on every frame - only when callbacks request to recreate it.

The application and widget data is managed using a reference-counted boxed type (RefAny), which can be downcasted to a concrete type if necessary. Widget-local data that needs to be retained between frames is stored on the DOM nodes themselves, similar to how the HTML dataset property can be used to store widget data.

Installation

Due to its relatively large size (and to provide C / C++ interop), azul is built as a dynamic library in the azul-dll package. You can download pre-built binaries from azul.rs/releases.

Using pre-built-binaries

1. Download the library from azul.rs/releases
2. Set your linker to link against the library
   • Rust: Set AZUL_LINK_PATH environment variable to the path of the library
   • C / C++: Copy the azul.h on the release page to your project headers and the azul.dll to your IDE project.

The API for Rust, C++ and other languages is exactly the same, since the API is auto-generated by the build.py script. If you want to generate language bindings for your language, you can generate them using the api.json file.

To run programs on Linux, you may also need to copy the libazul.so into /usr/lib. Eventually this will be solved by upstreaming the library into repositories once all major bugs are resolved.

Building from source (crates.io)

By default, you should be able to run

cargo install --version 1.0.0 azul-dll

to compile the DLL from crates.io. The library will be built and installed in the $AZUL_LINK_PATH directory, which defaults to $CARGO_HOME_DIR/lib/azul-dll-0.1.0/target/release/

Building from source (git)

Building the library from source requires clang as well as the prerequisites listed above.

git clone https://github.com/maps4print/azul
cd azul-dll
cargo build --release

This command should produce an azul.dll file in the /target/release folder, in order to use this, you will also need to set AZUL_LINK_PATH to $BUILD_DIR/target/release/.

If you are developing on the library, you may also need to re-generate the Rust / C API, in which case you should prefer to use the build.py script:

python3 ./build.py

Example

Note: The widgets are custom to each programming language. All callbacks have to use extern "C" in order to be compatible with the library. The binary layout of all API types is described in theapi.json file.

See the /examples folder for example code in different languages

Rust

use azul::prelude::*;
use azul_widgets::{button::Button, label::Label};

struct DataModel {
    counter: usize,
}

// Model -> View
extern "C" fn render_my_view(data: &RefAny, _: LayoutInfo) -> StyledDom {

    let mut result = StyledDom::default();

    let data = match data.downcast_ref::<DataModel>() {
        Some(s) => s,
        None => return result,
    };

    let label = Label::new(format!("{}", data.counter)).dom();
    let button = Button::with_label("Update counter")
        .onmouseup(update_counter, data.clone())
        .dom();

    result
    .append(label)
    .append(button)
}

// View updates model
extern "C" fn update_counter(data: &mut RefAny, event: CallbackInfo) -> UpdateScreen {
    let mut data = match data.downcast_mut::<DataModel>() {
        Some(s) => s,
        None => return UpdateScreen::DoNothing,
    };
    data.counter += 1;
    UpdateScreen::RegenerateDomForCurrentWindow
}

fn main() {
    let app = App::new(RefAny::new(DataModel { counter: 0 }), AppConfig::default());
    app.run(WindowCreateOptions::new(render_my_view));
}

C++

#include "azul.h"
#include "azul-widgets.h"

using namespace azul;
using namespace azul.widgets.button;
using namespace azul.widgets.label;

struct DataModel {
    counter: uint32_t
}

// Model -> View
StyledDom render_my_view(const RefAny& data, LayoutInfo info) {

    auto result = StyledDom::default();

    const DataModel* data = data.downcast_ref();
    if !(data) {
        return result;
    }

    auto label = Label::new(String::format("{counter}", &[data.counter])).dom();
    auto button = Button::with_label("Update counter")
       .onmouseup(update_counter, data.clone())
       .dom();

    result = result
        .append(label)
        .append(button);

    return result;
}

UpdateScreen update_counter(RefAny& data, CallbackInfo event) {
    DataModel data = data.downcast_mut().unwrap();
    data.counter += 1;
    return UpdateScreen::RegenerateDomForCurrentWindow;
}

int main() {
    auto app = App::new(RefAny::new(DataModel { .counter = 0 }), AppConfig::default());
    app.run(WindowCreateOptions::new(render_my_view));
}

C

#include "azul.h"

typedef struct {
    uint32_t counter;
} DataModel;

void DataModel_delete(DataModel* restrict A) { }
AZ_REFLECT(DataModel, DataModel_delete);

AzStyledDom render_my_view(AzRefAny* restrict data, AzLayoutInfo info) {

    AzString counter_string;

    DataModelRef d = DataModelRef_create(data);
    if (DataModel_downcastRef(data, &d)) {
        AzFmtArgVec fmt_args = AzFmtArgVec_fromConstArray({{
            .key = AzString_fromConstStr("counter"),
            .value = AzFmtValue_Uint(d.ptr->counter)
        }});
        counter_string = AzString_format(AzString_fromConstStr("{counter}"), fmt_args);
    } else {
        return AzStyledDom_empty();
    }
    DataModelRef_delete(&d);

    AzDom const html = {
        .root = AzNodeData_new(AzNodeType_Body),
        .children = AzDomVec_fromConstArray({AzDom_new(AzNodeType_Label(counter_string))}),
        .total_children = 1, // len(children)
    };
    AzCss const css = AzCss_fromString(AzString_fromConstStr("body { font-size: 50px; }"));
    return AzStyledDom_new(html, css);
}

UpdateScreen update_counter(RefAny& data, CallbackInfo event) {
    DataModelRefMut d = DataModelRefMut_create(data);
    if !(DataModel_downcastRef(data, &d)) {
        return UpdateScreen_DoNothing;
    }
    d->ptr.counter += 1;
    DataModelRefMut_delete(&d);
    return UpdateScreen_RegenerateDomForCurrentWindow;
}

int main() {
    DataModel model = { .counter = 5 };
    AzApp app = AzApp_new(DataModel_upcast(model), AzAppConfig_default());
    AzApp_run(app, AzWindowCreateOptions_new(render_my_view));
    return 0;
}

Documentation

The documentation is built using the build.py script, which will generate the entire azul.rs website in the /target/html directory:

python3 ./build.py

• Class documentation is available at azul.rs/api
• Tutorials is available under azul.rs/guide.

NOTE: The class documentation can also be printed as a PDF if you prefer that.

License

This library is licensed under the LGPL version 3.0 with an exception for static linking. Which means that similar to the FLTK and wxWidgets license, you can build proprietary applications without having to publish your source code: you only have to publish changes made to the azul library itself. The static linking exception allows you to statically link Azul without having to publish your code.

Copyright 2017 - current Felix Schütt