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Comment by pfraze | Hacker News Reader

Rik Arends has been working on a cross-platform IDE in Rust called Makepad [1]. It has a custom UI stack that targets wasm/webGL, osx/metal, windows/dx11, and linux/opengl. His premise (which is fairly ambitious) is to work in both 2d and VR environments. It's been fun to watch. There's a demo for the wasm target. [2]

1. https://github.com/makepad/makepad

2. https://makepad.github.io/makepad/

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Other than startup time, the wasm demo is very responsive on an underpowered moto g7. I'm shocked. Excellent work.

I was very impressed as well. On a desktop with a hardline it loaded instantly however the text is so small I can't make it out. Zooming gives things different degrees of fuzziness, with 150% zoom the least fuzzy (but still fuzzy).

Definitely raising the bar

Exactly my thoughts too, except I loaded it on an iMac, and it loaded instantaneously as well. Far more responsive than any web or Electron UI.

Really a very impressive demo, I could certainly be tricked into thinking it was native.

That interface works faster than switching between tabs in Firefox on iPhone 6s.

It’s probably the fastest web interface I had ever seen for a phone.

The online version is really nice. When thinking about the benefits of WASM, I have definitely considered sharing code between client and server, but I never really thought about the potential of sharing code between native clients and web clients. It's kind of a different concept of a progressive web app, and it seems really powerful!

Just like we used to do it with Java and Silverlight.

This is very cool. Especially the animate into compact code view when holding down the alt key. Is there an extension with similar functionality in any other editor?

Cool indeed, though I foud on Firefox that alt both toggled compact code view and toggled the Firefox menu bar, causing the display to jank around. Hope this is fixable.

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