Makepad - Leveraging Rust + Wasm + WebGL to Build Amazing Cross-platform Applications

JS Nation

JSNation 2022

Rik Arends

<p><span>In this talk I will show Makepad, a new UI stack that uses Rust, Wasm, and WebGL. Unlike other UI stacks, which use a hybrid approach, all rendering in Makepad takes place on the GPU. This allows for highly polished and visually impressive applications that have not been possible on the web so far. Because Makepad uses Rust, applications run both natively and on the Web via wasm. Makepad applications can be very small, on the order of just a few hundred kilobytes for wasm, to a few megabytes with native. Our goal is to develop Makepad into the UI stack of choice for lightweight and performant cross-platform applications. We intend to ship with our own design application and IDE.</span></p>