Build native, high-performance, cross-platform desktop apps with reason!
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!
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
- reason-fontkit
- reason-gl-matrix
- @reason-native/console
revery was inspired by some awesome projects:
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.