Differences with Dioxus
Freya is built on top of the core crates from Dioxus. This means that you will effectively be creating Dioxus components using RSX and hooks.
However, thanks to Dioxus being a renderer-agnostic library, you will NOT be using JavaScript, HTML, CSS, or any other abstraction that ends up using one of those or other web technologies.
Freya does everything on its own when it comes to:
- Elements
- Styling
- Layout
- Events
- Rendering
- Testing
- Built-in components and hooks
- Editing
- Animating
...and more. Dioxus is only used for managing app components (hooks, lifecycle, state, RSX), while everything else is managed by Freya.
Freya is not meant to be a drop-in alternative to Dioxus renderers but a GUI library on its own.
Below is a comparison of the main differences between Freya and the official Dioxus renderers for Desktop (WebView and Blitz):
| Category | Freya | Dioxus Renderers |
|---|---|---|
| Elements, attributes, and events | Custom | HTML |
| Layout | Custom (Torin) | CSS or Taffy |
| Styling | Custom | CSS |
| Renderer | Skia | WebView or WGPU |
| Components library | Custom (freya-components) | None, but can use HTML elements and CSS libraries |
| Devtools | Custom (freya-devtools) | Provided in WebView |
| Headless testing runner | Custom (freya-testing) | None, but tools like Playwright and similar are available |