Every six months or so I long for a consensus rust gui framework and try this one and run into an error from downloading the demo or playground or something like that.
Some of us want to invest many years of time and money into stuff and have to make the decision carefully.
Don't fool yourself, they've taken VC money [1], even being one of the top sponsored projects of all time on Github will not satiate the investors who want returns.
I want to invest in making an app out of this framework and not be a sponsor. Another thing that concerns me about this one (at least it did a while ago when I looked) is the general team size. This is a company yet there was only one employee the first couple times I looked at it.
+1. Frameworks learning costs are non-trivial. After you worked so hard to become productive in a particular framework it's frustrating to see its core and/or ecosystem fizzle --- especially when your existing code already tied the framework's unique constraints, making it a hassle to port to other frameworks. In this sense the "bus factor" / resilience of the framework dev does matter to the app dev building on top of it.
It's fine to downvote me. I do contribute $50 a month to an open source repo that I use commercially, so I'm not opposed to giving money to OSS projects.
Dioxus is a private company though. It is fine if people want to contribute, or if Dioxus wants investors. But isn't it a little weird trying to influence me/someone to donate to a private company to improve their _product_?
They are YC: they should raise more funds and get serious IMO. Hire more people, fix the broken stuff in the DX and more people will use the product. It's that simple.
Also if you want people to contribute money I would work on getting the product to a more usable state. People don't want to buy products that don't work, software or not. If the first experience is repeatedly one of not working software, people will not want to use it.
Just chiming in because I think the discussion is interesting (creator/founder here).
We don't need the OSS crowdsourced funding. Early 2025 I have plans to distribute whatever OSS capital we still have back into the Rust community, so at least donors won't feel like their money went directly into a company.
Fortunately, we did raise a good round and have plans to get "more serious" about it. Hiring is hard and this year it was challenging to balance hiring with solving users' issues in a timely manner. It's my first time doing it. Lots of the project's details are tucked deep in the depths of my brain.
We sadly have the curse of maintaining a project where the devtools need to work on mac/win/linux/wsl and the apps need to work on mac/win/linux/wasm/wsl/android/ios. I don't think people grok the scope of this work and the permutation explosion it brings. We test against mac/windows/linux of course, but there's always some weird issue with WSL or Windows Paths or some dependency's missing system library.
For example, we had to drop 3rd party tooling for mobile this release since that was constantly breaking our setups. There's still more dependencies we don't own completely that break frequently. I'm hopeful that hiring a larger team and prioritizing quality for the next few months will "solve" the majority of issues people run into.
It's not neccessarily a resource thing, but also, maybe primarily, a priorities thing. If they don't value stability now, they will probably use extra resources to build new features faster, at the same level of quality.
Some of us want to invest many years of time and money into stuff and have to make the decision carefully.