Start This Month In Linebender for July

Author: DJMcNab

content/blog/2025-08-05-tmil-19/index.md

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+title = "Linebender in July 2025"
+authors = ["Daniel McNab"]
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+
+Linebender is an informal open-source organization working on various projects to advance the state of the art in GUI for [the Rust programming language](https://rust-lang.org).
+
+## Vello
+
+Vello is our GPU vector renderer.
+It can draw large 2D scenes with high performance, using GPU compute shaders for most of the work.
+
+<!-- TODO -->
+- [vello#...][]:
+
+This month's progress on the sparse strips renderers, a collaborative evolution of Vello, has been centered around applying SIMD <!-- TODO -->.
+
+<!-- TODO -->
+- [vello#...][]:
+
+Our [working roadmap](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZquH-53j2OedTbgEKCJBKTh4WLE11UveM10mNdnVARY/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.j3duh9pgdm94) outlines the planned timeline for work on the renderers into next year.
+
+An integration of Vello as the backend for Servo's canvas rendering has landed in <!-- TODO --> (and also Vello CPU in <!-- TODO -->).
+
+<!-- TODO: Image of Canvas drawn with Vello? -->
+
+### Fearless SIMD
+
+TODO: A new blurb here?
+
+## Masonry
+
+Masonry is the widget system developed by Linebender.
+It provides a non-opinionated retained widget tree, designed as a base layer for high-level GUI frameworks.
+
+- [xilem#...][]:
+<!-- TODO -->
+
+<!-- <figure>
+
+<img style="height: auto" width="1464" height="955" src="multiple_windows.png" alt="Three overlapping windows on a black background. The frontmost window is titled Second Window, has text displaying a count of 11, a plus button, and a minus button, stacked vertically. Behind it is First Window, which is the same with a count of 13. At the back is a window titled Multiple Windows, which shows a map from the aforementioned windows to their values above a textbox and Add button. The textbox contains the text Next Window.">
+
+<figcaption>
+
+As of [xilem#1038][] Masonry (and Xilem) support multiple windows.
+
+</figcaption>
+</figure> -->
+
+## Xilem
+
+Xilem is our flagship GUI project, inspired by SwiftUI, which uses Masonry for its widgets.
+It lets you build user interfaces declaratively by composing lightweight views together, and will diff them to provide minimal updates to a retained layer.
+Our work on Placehero, which is the working name for our Mastodon client example, has inspired several significant architectural improvements in Xilem.
+
+- [xilem#...][]:
+<!-- TODO -->
+
+## Anymore
+
+We have factored a shared utility for use in both Xilem and Masonry...
+<!-- TODO -->
+
+## Parley
+
+Parley is a text layout library.
+It handles text layout, mostly at the level of line breaking and resolving glyph positions.
+
+- [parley#...][]:
+
+<!-- ## TODO: The other project news items? -->
+
+## Get Involved
+
+We welcome collaboration on any of our crates.
+This can include improving the documentation, implementing new features, improving our test coverage, or using them within your own code.
+
+We host an hour long office hours meeting each week where we discuss what's going on in our projects.
+We're also running a separate office hours time dedicated to the renderer collaboration, details also available at that link.
+See [#office hours in Zulip](https://xi.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/359642-office-hours) for details.
+
+If you wish to discuss the Linebender project individually, Daniel is offering ["office hours" appointments](https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/appointments/schedules/AcZssZ32eQYJ9DtZ_wJaYNtT36YioETiloZDIdImFpBFRo5-XsqGzpikgkg47LPsiHhpiwiQ1orOwwW2), which are free to book.
+It really helps us to learn what aspects our users care about the most.
+
+<!-- [Fearless SIMD]: https://github.com/linebender/fearless_simd
+[#simd channel]: https://xi.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/514230-simd -->