Kruci: Post-Mortem of a UI Library
6 days ago
- #Terminal Applications
- #Rust Programming
- #UI Development
- The author discusses their experience with creating a UI library for a terminal-based game, kartoffels, highlighting the challenges and trade-offs encountered.
- Initial motivation stemmed from optimizing CPU-heavy wave calculations for the game's ocean visuals, leading to broader considerations about UI efficiency.
- Critiques Ratatui, the Rust crate used for building terminal UIs, particularly its immediate mode rendering and diffing mechanism, which can be resource-intensive.
- Explores the idea of a widget tree for more efficient UI updates, contrasting with Ratatui's approach, but encounters complexities with event handling and state management.
- Discusses layout challenges in terminal UIs, proposing a Swift-inspired approach with HStack, VStack, and ZStack for widget placement, but notes the difficulties in implementation.
- Concludes that while the experiment provided valuable insights, the practical benefits did not justify continuing development, opting instead to focus on improving the game with existing tools.