Hi people, i made makepad. i can answer questions

@Will asked:

I’m actually mystified at the real-time compilation. Is that because it’s a completely different compiler using a Rust skin?

@Rik Arends Couple of questions came up in the original thread you might want to look at.

oh right. this thing has threads

What strategy did you use for font rendering? Anytime I’ve looked into writing a complete rendering stack I’ve been shocked by how crazy just trying to render high fidelity Unicode is.

At first i used MSDF, which worked great actually except on lowDPI, then we switched to 'pathfinder-2' style GPU atlasses. So we GPU accelerate (but not super fast) render our atlasses for a certain subpixel position+size

Yeah that’s fair. We played around with MSDF as well but balked when we realized the textures would be ~40gb for unicode haha. Interesting that it did poorly in lowDPI, we hadn’t played with it long enough to discover that one. 🙂

yea so we load our own TTF's and render the atlasses entirely on demand. So luckily no 40gb textures

Cheers! I’ve been following makepad as well 🙂 The first time I pressed alt in the editor, I was shocked by how wonderfully smooth it was compared to pretty much anything else I’ve seen. Can’t wait to see where you take the foundation you’ve got now!

Thanks! We're going for 'new shadertoy' because shaders give me a live backend, also the system has some really interesting answers to improve shaderprogramming. Things will rapidly happen now.

Yeah, I’ve found ways to get JS there, but you can’t write anything that actually looks like JS to do it. The backend for the language we’ve been writing is built so that it can pretty trivially emit whatever. It’ll be interesting to try some c-like JS vs Rust vs Rust compiled WASM vs direct to WASM at some point 🙂

Yea that would be the ideal situation. I'm solving it by moving certain domains (UI styling, shaders, layout) into the 'live' coding, and the rest will simply have to wait for a Rust recompile cycle. Which isnt THAT long to be fair.

Yeah, I’m trying to avoid relying on LLVM primarily by generating code that needs very little optimization to be fast. We compile the language down to a very small set of semantics around just bare arrays and simple primitives.

Yea i considered that option, but luckily Rust saved me from going down the even longer path 🙂 Looking forward to see what you come up with. Still eve-ish? Or something new

Something new. Not explicitly trying to go for accessibility this time, though where we’re landing may end up that way by accident. Mostly trying to see what happens if we tried to make just ourselves super human. We’ve learned a lot since the end of Eve and figured out how to solve a bunch of the issues we ran into. E.g. I don’t think performance is going to be a problem this time heh.

Yeah im definitely not going for accessibility. Makepad is mostly an excercise in how to make building code-editors, ide's an complex designtool UI performant, and suck least to write. Any fallout it can gather for broader appeal will have to come from a domain like Shaders.

I should really invite L Ritter here... I'm not sure if he knows about the community but it seems like he might be into it

VR support right now is more of an experiment. I've always said the UI tech would work in VR, so now we are proving that. I think it could be really nice 'extra' if our webbased shader editor has a VR mode that also works. For now we stick to webXR, but integrating a nativeVR platform probably isin the order of a week of work so its not that hard.

Hi Rik, since you're living in the Netherlands.. have you got a WBSO-subsidy for makepad? I use it for my FoC-project

Hi, not at the moment, makepad is in 'startup' mode. But i might apply since i think it does fit