Being a simulated guitar hero and simulated pro skater is more enriching than the likely baseline of having zero experience with either.
And, video games can help in discovering real world passions — the number of guitarists who found their inspirational spark through Guitar Hero is likely significant. Same for Factorio or Minecraft -> programming.
Will also capture a GIF, makes a lot of sense; just gotta nail condensing the story.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1fdmjzl/pax_enters_be...
Major constraints for a given language will be runtime size and browser viability — it's fine to use e.g. C# and the CLR when deploying a desktop or (arguably) a mobile app, but it's a showstopper to bundle a several-hundred-MB wasm runtime to ship a C# app to the web. Zig and C++ don't share this problem, and JS gets a freebie because the browser already includes the JS runtime.
Community contributions would be amazing in this regard. Likely our core team should ship JavaScript support first as a template, then Pax's language support should be roughly as extensible as e.g. Stripe's SDKs: https://github.com/stripe
Highly recommend trying out the site on desktop, where you will get an interactive preview of Pax Designer.
Hey HN! We are Zack, Warfa, and Sam. After some human-years of building Pax, we're excited finally to enter Beta and to invite anyone to build with Pax for the first time.What is Pax?Pax is a tool for building native apps & websites, similar to SwiftUI or Flutter. Pax is driven by a declarative user interface description language that attaches to Rust application logic. Pax itself is built...
Our solution requires language constraints — a hermetic separation of concerns between the declarative description language (.pax) and a Turing-complete programming language (starting with Rust.)
These language constraints and rendering requirements[0] are so core to our solution that building anywhere other than the systems level was not tenable.
[0] Specifically, the runtime must render in "design tool coordinates," to enable a vector design tool authoring UX. This authoring experience must also be extremely fast, like Figma's. The rendering engine must be designed around this requirement and neither HTML/CSS's or Flutter's were.
Silverlight sought to do this with XAML, but it had other problems (required a plugin right as plugins were on their way out; CLR was a huge dependency; too locked down and proprietary under Ballmer leadership)
Can you imagine a text-first content representation, which is visually editable with the UX of a vector design tool? This is the rabbit hole that drives our work on Pax.
1. not Figma or Flash: it's not practical or performant to manipulate HTML/CSS to achieve the creative freedom of a vector design tool[0]
2. the rest of these that build on HTML: not a single one of them exposes that code for manual editing, so they're not developer tools and their "alternate layouts" are proprietary + locked away.
The root issue: HTML was not designed to be a substrate for design.
[0] I don't claim this casually; I spent several years seeking to do exactly this with github.com/famous/famous and https://www.haikuanimator.com/
The difference between Webflow and Figma is immense; Pax unlocks a Figma-style visual creative experience while building software.
Unlike Flash: driven by a markup language, fully open source, no plugin required, solves a11y, compiles to native apps incl. mobile
Unlike Silverlight: fully open source, no plugin required, no heavy VM
Unlike JavaFX: no plugin required, no heavy VM, visual builder is a vector design tool
Unlike Flutter: designed for web (small footprint, a11y out of the box); first-party and foundationally integrated visual builder, visual builder is a vector design tool
None of these is a perfect technology, but I believe the most practical answer to the question driving this thread[0] is to study/understand the landscape, then build towards a better future.[1]
[0] > Care to point us to a better combination than HTML/CSS when it comes to layouting flexible interfaces?
[1] www.pax.dev
Flexbox was once an "alternate layout engine for the web," as was Flash player, as is Figma. Framer, Retool, and Squarespace all offer alternate layout engines tailored for visual building. All of these seem practical to me.
HTML/CSS is pretty good!
SwiftUI's HStack and VStack are solid, though they suffer from ambient API complexity & Conway's law.[0]
Figma's autolayout is a strong reference, but it's not a tool for creating software.
> Maybe instead of coming up with a new thing, we just need a clear way to solve the pain points and put the solutions into CSS4 and HTML6
Why not both? Innovate freely and independently (the prerogative of any builder) and adopt as spec any innovations that pass committee.
[0] arguably same diagnosis, different course of disease vs. HTML/CSS
Agreed: pretty good. Shouldn't we pursue excellence?
Syntax is fairly contentious. "One man's trash is another man's treasure," on your note of "old garbage." It's hard to please everyone, however:
We could offer syntax "skins," since the data storage mechanism is a layer separated from the AST (thus different ASTs/syntaxes could de/serialize from the same persisted data.) So folks who want closing tags can have them; folks who want a YAML-like format could have it; folks who want a KDL-like language could have it.
At the language level, Pax's distinguishing characteristic is that it's the union of an expression language and a markup language; this is the reason we couldn't use an off the shelf markup language / parser. But again, KDL or YAML could be extended with PAXEL to make pax-kdl and pax-yaml flavors alongside pax-xml.
We had to start somewhere, and starting as close as possible to the markup lingua franca (HTML) made sense to us. It'd be a dream for Pax to be loved / adopted enough that we or anyone else cares to make a syntax skin.
Taken to an extreme, "don't break backwards compatibility" has an insidious failure mode, which is "don't innovate." The car could not have come about without a willingness to break backwards compatibility with horse drawn carriages, plows, mills, hitching posts, etc.
The adoption of a radically new technology like this is voluntary, collaborative, and progressive. Provided it offers enough value to exceed the switching costs, there's no need to kill efforts or bury knowledge bases.
We predict 95%+ of Pax will be written by machines, especially visual design tools and LLMs, so verbosity becomes less important (LLMs may even benefit from explicit closing tags.) We're innovating on multiple axes, including language, so we chose to make the syntax itself as boring and uninnovative as possible.
> There has never been a better markup language.
> It has been the best thing for accessibility we ever came up with.
I couldn't help but notice your use of the past tense in both sentences above. Is it the best thing we can come up with, looking toward the future?
I argue we can do better, while celebrating and building off of what's great about the past & present.[0]
[0] https://docs.pax.dev/intro-priorities-and-prior-art/#:~:text...
HTML & CSS themselves have become a major bottleneck to quality and creativity. The arcane layout model, the baggage of backwards compatibility, the cognitive dissonance — played out over decades of design-by-committee — between "this is a document engine" and "this is an app engine."
The rendering-thread-is-the-main-thread architecture of JS plus the JS garbage collector cause jitters & frame drops that most people don't consciously recognize, but everyone subconsciously recognizes. These little bits of jank are why consumers can recognize webview-wrapped apps vs. native apps.
Don't get me wrong — HTML and CSS and JS have brought us far, and the zero-trust execution environment that is the browser is an amazing feat of humanity.
I hope the "new ways of doing things" you describe include a major innovation on HTML and CSS and JS. WebAssembly makes this possible today — and I have dedicated the last few years of my life to proving this concept[0], and I hope others explore similar avenues. We deserve a better substrate, and this can be done without reinventing the browser.
[0] www.pax.dev
Sort of like a new Flash, but open source, compiles to WASM or LLVM instead of requiring a plugin, and driven by language all the way down.
The language piece is a declarative UI language tailored to vector design; the vector design tool reads & writes this declarative language and you can go back and forth between visual edits and code edits. All of this attaches to and is driven by existing programming languages, starting with Rust and following soon with JavaScript.
Getting very close to our first launch! Have been quietly developing in the open for a while.
Haven't measured the footprint of cel-rust yet, but I expect it's orders of magnitude smaller than cel-go. The Go runtime itself is the culprit with cel-go.
This Rust implementation may let us port to CEL after all, while maintaining Pax's <100KB wasm footprint. Nice work!
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> (digestive problems vs anaphylaxis) ... and would probably be better classified as an intolerance similar to lactose
is misinformation — "digestive problems" and "intolerance" drastically understate the seriousness of celiac disease, and contribute to the educational challenges surrounding the condition.
The chronic impact of gluten exposure to a celiac patient include: permanent damage to the small intestine, malnutrition, reduction of lifespan, and significantly increased risk of comorbid autoimmune diseases (MS, diabetes, and more) and cancer.
The acute symptoms span from gastrointestinal symptoms to neurological issues, systemic pain, and cognitive impairment. The reason for all of this is gluten causes the celiac patient's immune system to mobilize and attack the patient, i.e. "autoimmunity." Not anaphylactic, correct, but not a digestive problem nor an intolerance.
As a point of interest, most of the developed world already requires labeling gluten as a major allergen. The US is the outlier / laggard.
Friendly advice from a stranger, worth what it costs: I believe the greatest inconvenience of a commercial license will be to _you_, as opposed to end-users.
The market is so saturated with open source, developers expect it, and commercial licenses cause huge usage friction and doubt.
The "dual license" died as a viable business model around the time Meta (née Facebook) and Microsoft starting investing billions into free-as-in-beer OSS, 10-15 years ago.
Today, this model will only sabotage usage. People using your OSS is good. Even if your goal isn't to become popular, usage & feedback are learning, and while it's fine for popularity not to be a goal, I would encourage you not to proactively target the opposite of popularity.
If you have some other IP (the other tech you're describing) that can remain proprietary or wrapped behind a service, then people using other pieces of your stack for free is a _really good thing._ At least, they're aware of your brand and have started to trust it. At best, they're ready to use your commercial offering out of the gate.