1.3 KiB
New GUI design
GUI framework
We absolutely need to move away from the "webpage in a webview" model that we used for Geph4, which was slow, laggy, and somewhat difficult to style in a way that looks like a GUI rather than a webpage. The only advantage was code reuse across platforms, but the complexity required to bootstrap all the pieces together (platform-specific webview code, platform-specific "glue" code, HTML/JS, and a platform-specific geph4-client) make it almost not worth it.
Instead, Geph5 will have a egui, since it's
- completely cross-platform, even to mobile
- very fast, even on low-end devices
- does not have any bloated dependencies
- has a nice minimalistic / retro-ish aesthetic
Also I just really love immediate-mode GUIs.
RPC design
Like the old GUI design, we use an RPC mechanism to communicate between the GUI and the steady-state business logic. This is the case even in platforms where Geph is a single-process program (desktops), since on iOS (and possibly Android) it's most natural for Geph to run on a different process.
However, RPC mechanisms are not used for one-off business logic, like retrieving the list of exit nodes, logging in, etc. We directly call into code that does these things from the GUI code.
Fortunately, through nanorpc-sillad this can be made completely type-safe and natural.