Concept for a front-end web rendering framwork

Nathan-Franck · February 7, 2024, 7:16pm

Hello, I’ve gone down a bit of a zig/wasm rabbit hole, and have built out a concept of a theoretical web framework where UI could be built-up in a very similar way to how React works. Is there something like this already? I am trying to do other stuff in my spare time, but at some point maybe this would be worth implementing for realsies

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/Nathan-Franck/0df9b8b42f07c548d0ec5933169b1f70

reactey-zig-concept.zig

// Theoretical framework for a UI library in Zig that mirrors a bit of what React does

const std = @import("std");

fn Store(T: type) type {
    return struct {
        value: T,
        fn setValue(self: *@This(), value: T) void {
            self.value = value;
        }

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jackdbd · March 3, 2024, 10:13pm

Have a look at this library by Karsten Schmidt. UI & DOM creation/manipulation is done via WebAssembly. The library takes an imperative approach, but maybe you could build something on top of it instead of building a framework completely from scratch.

I used that library in a presentation I gave a few months ago. There are a couple of slides that show how to use it.

jackdbd · March 3, 2024, 11:30pm

Now that I think about it, Karsten’s umbrella monorepo also contains a state management library similar to valtio or jotai, and a functional reactive programming library that contains streams and subscription primitives. With that I think you could build something similar to signals in Preact/Solid/Qwik.