Really hope this project succeeds as somebody heavily invested in a Flutter app with a Rust backend Dioxus could be great for us so we will continue to follow closely.
Flutters hot reloading is awesome but some days I feel like it is death by a thousand cuts working with Flutter (so many unresolved bugs) so to have a cross-platform framework that wouldn't require Flutter and Dart would be great.
Same! I inherited a Flutter app from a previous team, and while it's OK it feels kind of like developing on a Galapagos island — by which I mean, we'll never use Dart in any other context, and Flutter's web story doesn't really work for most kinds of apps).
I think Dioxus actually fits into a fairly unique set of slots. There's Tauri, with which it shares a lot of stuff, but Tauri's web story is mostly "build it yourself". There's Leptos, which arguably has a better web app story, but lacks most of the rest.
It is also heartening to see how these projects really do share a lot of the building blocks and don't seem to be overly competitive.
No, not really. I mean it can be, but in practice the level of complexity is pretty similar to something like Objective-C or Swift (or, I assume, C++, although I haven't used C++ much).
I'm taking about the "back end" for a desktop native app here.
For the frontend end Dioxus presents a DSL that, while Rust-based, isn't really harder to learn than JSX or Angular's templates.
I've only done a couple small Dioxus apps so far, so I am not an expert, but one immediately clear difference compared to a TypeScript SPA web app is you really do much less in the frontend. Even really simple things that you could do in JavaScript in an SPA, you turn into a call to the backend (native portion of the app).
I think you're right that Dioxus wouldn't be the best choice for most organizations building a web app only, but the appeal is more like "more efficient and performant Electron, that can also produce a web-based version of the app easily".
Covering Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android and web as target platforms for a single code base is a grail that nobody has quite nailed yet. Flutter's web story sucks, and desktop support is weaker than mobile. React Native has big differences between target platforms. I mean, there are a bunch of attempts to solve this problem, and they all have had big shortcomings in some areas.
Dioxus might, too — I personally don't know, I've never tried its mobile stuff — but it's interesting on that basis.
It seems shaky trying to apply labels like "low level" or "high level" to Rust, it covers a very broad range of these "levels", just short of C and Zig on the low level end (at least, without becoming substantially less ergonomic), and just short of Haskell at the high level end. Rust definitely gets more attention for its low level characteristics where its safety features set it apart from its peers in that space, but it's still suitable outside that space, just less distinctively suitable, and so less widely discussed.
Some other languages will certainly have more developed ecosystems and frameworks available, but the purpose of things like Dioxus is to provide that. Instead of trying to put things into boxes with labels and deduce from there, you'll get more insight from trying it out and seeing where it works and where it actually struggles.
> Isn't Rust too low level for regular back end development
What do you mean by low level?
To be honest, I’ve been using Rust on the backend for two years now and I’ve been loving it. It’s reliable and fast, minimal memory footprint and you don’t even have to be a Rust expert if you’re not trying to squeeze every single bit of performance from your system.
Flutters hot reloading is awesome but some days I feel like it is death by a thousand cuts working with Flutter (so many unresolved bugs) so to have a cross-platform framework that wouldn't require Flutter and Dart would be great.
Wish the Dioxus team a lot of success!