I just attempted to write up a simple Minesweeper game with Iced. No bells or whistles, but it works:
https://github.com/veniamin-ilmer/minesweeper
On one hand, I find it pretty cool I built a clear cross platform GUI with actual functionality, within only 200 lines of code.
On the other hand, I can’t help but see how inefficient it seems. If I ever need to modify any of the objects, I need to redraw all of them. The structure of the view method makes me think it is very difficult for Iced to maintain a “virtual DOM” to only make delta changes.
Am I wrong? Is there a more efficient way to do this in Iced?
Edit: I just found this - https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/pull/1284
As the library matures, the need for some kind of persistent widget data (see #553) between view calls becomes more apparent (e.g. incremental rendering, animations, accessibility, etc.).
If we are going to end up having persistent widget data anyways… There is no reason to have impure, stateful widgets anymore!
So it seems like Iced plans to have an internal “persistent widget storage”, which in abstracted away from the user. But it is quite unclear to me how they would accomplish this, considering the view method doesn’t provide an ID for any of its objects, so it would not be easy for Iced to determine the difference between updates.
The application crashes when I start it, perhaps due to wgpu. After switching to
iced = { git = "https://github.com/pop-os/iced" }, I’m able to run it and see 7.7 MB memory consumption. We use a software-based renderer by default. Keep in mind though that Windows also doesn’t accurately report memory usage, and in Rust we have everything statically-linked into the binary. And there’s a lot of stuff being embedded and cached in memory at the moment as these libraries are being developed.