Why We're Rewriting Astropad in Rust (opens in new tab)

(blog.astropad.com)

10 pointsmronge6y ago4 comments

4 comments

rvz6y ago

For those who haven't heard, Astropad allows illustrators, artists and animators to turn their existing iPad into a professional graphics tablet for macOS.

Choosing Rust to meet the cross-platform requirements for Astropad is a great choice and a interesting one. I have read the previous article [0] on how Astropad was unfortunately Sherlocked by Apple [1] in the Catalina + iPadOS Sidecar feature and given that Astropad works only on macOS, it makes sense to become cross-platform to bring Astropad onto platforms like Windows or Linux since Apple only cares about its walled-garden. So I'm very happy to see Astropad take this move into trying Rust.

[0] - https://blog.astropad.com/sherlocked-by-apple/#more-6368

[1] - https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/apple-previews-macos-...

pnako6y ago

I'm curious what they use for the GUI. C++ with Qt might have been a safer choice. Like most Rust advocacy articles, it says it rejects "C/C++" because of the flaws of C.

mrongeOP6y ago

That's a great question. Our UI is pretty light on the desktop side and most of the complex UI is on the iPad which we don't have to rewrite (yet). So we will most likely use the native UI APIs and use Rust's excellent FFI support.

C++ would have been a safe choice, but then well... we'd be stuck using C++. We still do use C++, a lot of our video codec is in C/C++ but parts outside of that will be Rust.

pnako6y ago

Oh, I see. I thought you wanted to recreate the whole thing on Windows, but it looks like you just stream the iPad screen onto the desktop. In which case you can indeed probably just use Win32 and DirectX.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

4 comments

rvz6y ago

For those who haven't heard, Astropad allows illustrators, artists and animators to turn their existing iPad into a professional graphics tablet for macOS.

[0] - https://blog.astropad.com/sherlocked-by-apple/#more-6368

[1] - https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/apple-previews-macos-...

pnako6y ago

I'm curious what they use for the GUI. C++ with Qt might have been a safer choice. Like most Rust advocacy articles, it says it rejects "C/C++" because of the flaws of C.

mrongeOP6y ago

C++ would have been a safe choice, but then well... we'd be stuck using C++. We still do use C++, a lot of our video codec is in C/C++ but parts outside of that will be Rust.

pnako6y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse