mobile-bungalow / iced_dynamic_view_mod

dynamically loaded view module for iced at runtime

dynamic view module iced example

What is this?

Some people were wondering about how to speed up incremental iced builds. Because iced uses the elm architecture it's state is nicely encapsulated and modifiable in the the runtimes calls to application::view. We can leverage this to dynamically recompile and relink just the view function, this could save us time by avoiding relinking larger dependencies which might include tungstenite or plotters, or libraries that make heavy use of proc macros.

how do I run it?

1. build the dylib in view_mod with cargo build.
2. call cargo run in the main crate.
3. make changes to the view mod, build it again, do anything which sends a message, watch the UI update.

Does it really improve iteration time?

No, not in most cases, but it really could given a few minor changes.

1. with the addition of a dynamic backend to iced we could pass a box<dyn Renderer> to the dylib and not have to relink wgpu, gfx, lyon, etc. every time we rebuild the dylib. The renderer trait must be implemented by a sized type. this idea for speeding up dynamically linked builds is out the window.
2. Iced is lazy in it's calls to view, so refreshing requires the view to be updated, writing a subscriber that watches file events and calls dymod::reload would also be ideal.
3. this is actually a lot of hassle.

Goals

ideally a dynamic backend to iced would build in less that 2 seconds allowing for really HTML equivalent iteration speeds.