Michael Aaron Murphy, Pop!_OS distribution lead and contributor to the Redox operating system, spoke about working on a new edition of the COSMIC user environment. COSMIC is being transformed into a self-contained project that does not use GNOME Shell and is developed in Rust. The environment is planned to be used in the Pop!_OS distribution, which is pre-installed on laptops and PCs from System76.
It is noted that after long discussions and experiments, the developers decided to use the Iced library instead of GTK to build the interface. According to the engineers from System76, the Iced library, which has been actively developed recently, has already reached a level sufficient to be used as the basis for a user environment. During the experiments, various COSMIC applets were prepared, written simultaneously in GTK and Iced to compare technologies. Experiments have shown that, compared to GTK, the Iced library provides a more flexible, expressive, and understandable API, blends naturally with Rust code, and offers an architecture familiar to developers familiar with the Elm declarative interface building language.
The Iced library is written entirely in Rust, using type-safe, modular architecture, and a reactive programming model. Several rendering engines are provided that support Vulkan, Metal, DX12, OpenGL 2.1+ and OpenGL ES 2.0+, as well as a windowing shell and a web integration engine. Iced-based applications can be built for Windows, macOS, Linux and run in a web browser. Developers are offered a ready-made set of widgets, the ability to create asynchronous handlers and use the adaptive layout of interface elements depending on the size of the window and screen. The code is distributed under the MIT license.
Source: opennet.ru