llimphi

Native UI framework — 2D and 3D: HAL · raster · layout · text · theme · ui · 3D voxel engine — plus widgets and modules.

llimphi is a sovereign, retained-mode UI framework with an Elm-style loop (input → update → view → layout → raster → present). Declarative pipeline over vello 0.9 + wgpu 29 + taffy 0.12 + parley 0.6, with Dark/Light/Aurora/Sunset/Tawa themes, AccessKit accessibility and a multi-platform HAL (Wayland · X11 · Win32 · Android · Wawa bare-metal). It powers a full Rust application suite; this repository is the framework extracted to stand on its own.

_{real widgets in motion — rendered headless, frame-by-frame, fully deterministic}

_{…and the entire Elm loop in ~124 LOC — cargo run -p llimphi-ui --example counter}

Not just 2D — a 3D voxel engine

_{flying over an endless voxel world — rendered headless by llimphi-3d, frame-by-frame}

llimphi-3d is a 3D engine on the same wgpu: it composes voxels (a GPU ray-march) and triangle meshes in one shared depth pass, with a keyframed cinema camera. It mounts into the ordinary 2D View tree through the GPU paint node (set_viewport + scissor), so a 3D viewport can live in a panel next to regular widgets — no second window, same Elm loop.

llimphi-voxel adds the content layer on top: procedural world-gen (WorldRecipe), articulated characters (age + animation clips) and a scripted scene director. The GIF above is one such world. (A full voxel world studio — edit worlds, cast characters, direct filmed scenes, export to video — is built on these in the wider project.)

Usage manual: MANUAL.md — full reference (Elm loop, View<Msg> DSL, the 70 widgets and 11 modules, GPU path, gotchas) for humans and AI. Design rationale and roadmap: SDD.md.

Philosophy: widgets aren't designed against mockups; they're designed with what vello and taffy can do.

Quick start

git clone https://git.tawasuyu.net/tawasuyu/llimphi.git
cd llimphi
cargo run -p llimphi-ui --example counter   # ~124 LOC: the full Elm loop on screen

Install

From crates.io — the llimphi facade re-exports llimphi-ui, llimphi-theme and llimphi-3d:

cargo add llimphi

Or crate by crate (widgets are one crate each — pull only what you use):

[dependencies]
llimphi-ui    = "0.1"
llimphi-theme = "0.1"
llimphi-widget-button = "0.1"

Beyond the 2D widget kit

Pieces worth naming because they change what an app can be:

• Four paths to pixels, one compositor. vello on GPU compute is the main road; llimphi-cpu (vello_cpu) paints the bare-metal framebuffer; llimphi-hybrid (vello_hybrid) is CPU+GPU with no compute shaders, for hardware that lacks it (this is the one that runs on a phone's Mali); and llimphi-wire-escena serializes a scene so a sandboxed guest can compose it and a host replay it. The same scene tree goes through all of them and the output is diffed per pixel — wire vs direct is bit-identical, hybrid vs CPU never differs by more than 1/255.
• Text. parley shapes; llimphi-glifos rasterizes each glyph once into a shelf-packed coverage atlas (4 subpixel positions per axis) so a line of text is quads instead of outlines — 3.6–5× faster on the direct-GPU path.
• Testing. llimphi-test is the headless, deterministic golden-image harness — the reason a UI change can be certified as text (pixel-diff counts per threshold) instead of by looking at a screenshot. Where two paths should paint the same thing, the oracle is the other path, not a blessed image.
• Animation. llimphi-anim is a Rive-style, clip-agnostic state machine; llimphi-lottie and llimphi-svg are thin bridges to velato and vello_svg; llimphi-mesh renders deformable meshes with bones and skinning.
• Surfaces. llimphi-layer runs an App as a wlr-layer-shell surface (a bar anchored to a screen edge) rather than a window. llimphi-term-graphics covers the terminal graphics protocols.

Compatibility

• Linux/Wayland — primary backend.
• Linux/X11 — via XWayland.
• macOS / Windows — winit + wgpu.
• Android — HAL via android crates (hybrid is the renderer that works on Mali).
• Wawa bare-metal — alternative framebuffer HAL, over llimphi-cpu.

Full crate index (framework · widgets · modules · android) in MANUAL.md §19.

Considerations

• Single API: declarative View<Msg>. No imperative, no foreign vDOM.
• Same scene tree on Wayland and Wawa: HAL abstracts the surface.
• Widgets are purely visual; modules encapsulate state + behavior.