Author your UI with Dioxus. Let Compose draw it.

Why it exists

This stack is aimed at applications that stay open all day, where weight is felt every hour. Web-based shells are not light: a webview brings a browser engine with it, and a bundled JRE adds 80 to 120 MB even after jlink.

The obvious answer, a pure-Rust UI framework, fails on the part that matters most for anything text-driven: text itself. Korean, Japanese and Chinese input goes through the platform IME, and an IME that is 90% right is an app you cannot use. Compose Multiplatform already has mature text, IME and widget behaviour, so this project borrows exactly that and nothing else: Rust keeps the application code, Compose becomes an interpreter for a UI tree that Rust sends it.

What it looks like

This is the desktop_demo example from the repository, shortened. The widget names are Compose's; the attributes are their snake_case Rust spellings.

use dioxus_compose::prelude::*;

fn app() -> Element {
    let mut messages = use_signal(Vec::<String>::new);
    let mut draft = use_signal(String::new);

    rsx! {
        Column {
            fill_max_width: true,
            Text { text: "dioxus-compose chat" }
            for message in messages() {
                Text { text: message }
            }
            TextField {
                placeholder: "Write a message",
                multiline: true,
                on_value_change: move |value| draft.set(value),
                on_key_down: move |event: KeyEvent| {
                    if event.key() == Key::Enter && !event.shift_key() {
                        // … push the draft into messages …
                        event.consume();
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

fn main() {
    dioxus_compose::launch(app);
}

Status

This is an honest table, not a roadmap dressed as a feature list. Only macOS desktop runs end to end today. Everything marked planned is designed in SPEC.md and not implemented.

Feature status

Where to go next