Awesome

:construction: NOTE: Revery is a work-in-progress and in active development! :construction:

To get a taste of Revery, check out our JavaScript + WebGL build on the playground. For the best experience, though, you'll want to try a native build.

Motivation

Today, Electron is one of the most popular tools for building desktop apps - using an HTML, JS, CSS stack. However, it has a heavy footprint in terms of both RAM and CPU - essentially packing an entire browser into the app. Even with that tradeoff, it has a lot of great aspects - it's the quickest way to build a cross-platform app & it provides a great development experience - as can be testified by its usage in popular apps like VSCode, Discord, and Slack.

Revery is kind of like super-fast, native code Electron - with bundled React-like/Redux-like libraries and a fast build system - all ready to go!

Revery is built with reasonml, which is a javascript-like syntax on top of OCaml This means that the language is accessible to JS developers.

Your apps are compiled to native code with the Reason / OCaml toolchain - with instant startup and performance comparable to native C code. Revery features platform-accelerated, GPU-accelerated rendering. The compiler itself is fast, too!

Revery is an experiment - can we provide a great developer experience and help teams be productive, without making sacrifices on performance?

Design Decisions

• Consistent cross-platform behavior

A major value prop of Electron is that you can build for all platforms at once. You have great confidence as a developer that your app will look and work the same across different platforms. Revery is the same - aside from platform-specific behavior, if your app looks or behaves differently on another platform, that's a bug! As a consequence, Revery is like flutter in that it does not use native widgets. This means more work for us, but also that we have more predictable functionality cross-platform!

NOTE: If you're looking for something that does leverage native widgets, check out briskml. Another alternative is the cuite OCaml binding for Qt.

• High performance

Performance should be at the forefront, and not a compromise - we need to develop and build benchmarks that help ensure top-notch performance and start-up time.

• Type-safe, functional code

We might have some dirty mutable objects for performance - but our high-level API should be purely functional. You should be able to follow the React model of modelling your UI as a pure function of application state -> UI.

Getting Started

• Check out revery-quick-start to get up and running with your own Revery app!
• Try out our interactive playground
• Read through our docs

Contributing

We'd love your help, and welcome PRs and contributions.

Some ideas for getting started:

• Build and run Revery
• View our Roadmap
• Help us improve our documentation
• Help us build examples
• Help us fix bugs and build features
• Help us log bugs and open issues
• Support the project on OpenCollective
• Follow us on Twitter or chat with us on Discord!

License

Revery is provided under the MIT License.

Revery bundles several dependencies under their own license terms - please refer to ThirdPartyLicenses.txt.

Contributors

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to Revery!

Backers

Thank you to all our backers! 🙏 [Become a backer]

<a href="https://opencollective.com/revery#backers" target="_blank"><img src="https://opencollective.com/revery/backers.svg?width=890"></a>

Built with Revery

Special Thanks

revery would not be possible without a bunch of cool tech:

• ocaml made these tools possible - thanks Inria & OCaml Labs!
• reasonml made revery possible - thanks @jordwalke!
• flex by @jordwalke
• briskml
  • brisk-reconciler - the "native React" implementation.
• reason-sdl2
  • SDL2
  • stb-image
• reason-fontkit
  • freetype2
  • harfbuzz
• reason-gl-matrix
  • gl-matrix
  • glm
• @reason-native/console

revery was inspired by some awesome projects:

• react-native
• ReactMini
• cuite
• wall
• elm
• reprocessing

Hot reload

We don't have a Hot Reload yet but it is on our roadmap. In the meantime, you can check branch feat/hot-reload to see the progression.

In the meantime @mbernat has done a script that allow to relaunch the APP when the binary changed.