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leostera / erlang-gui

An experiment in building high-performance, native graphical user interfaces in Erlang
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actor-model bindings distributed-systems elixir erlang framework gpu-acceleration gui rust

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Hello, GUI

The two goals behind the project are:

  1. To prove that we can build a high-performance massively parallel graphical user system
  2. To provide a reflective, self-hosted environment in which to build Erlang systems in the spirit of Smalltalk

Architecture

Currently the main project is split into 2 layers, from the top down:

  1. Chalk, a high-level graphics pipeline that leverages Erlang's SMP.

  2. A set of NIFs and Ports written in Rust to interact with native libraries that provide hardware accelerated graphics.

On top of Chalk, we can build libraries for:

  1. Writing any kind of GUI applications

  2. Writing games, interactive media, and digital art

On top of which we can build an interactive environment for building Erlang systems, that runs within Erlang, in Erlang, and allows you to visualize, edit, and modify the code of the running system as it runs.

Motivation

As part of the StageVM project, Hello GUI aims to explore the required abstractions to efficiently build and run GUI applications that continue to enjoy [The Free Lunch](the free lunch is over link).

In addition, the process will help evaluate the difficulties in extending an actor runtime system to access native resources with minimum overhead.