Blitz-Quick

Blitz-Quick is an experimental, ultra-minimal, and high-performance cross-platform UI rendering architecture. It completely discards heavy browser kernels (Chromium/WebKit) and the V8 engine, utilizing a Rust + QuickJS stack to deliver a native application base with an extremely low memory footprint.

export-1783741591655.mp4

🎯 Purpose

"JS only handles UI logic, everything else is delegated to Rust."

In traditional Webview / Electron architectures, massive DOM trees and complex Browser APIs consume vast amounts of memory and introduce significant IPC overhead. The core objectives of this project are:

1. DOM-less Reactive UI: Uses SolidJS (via a custom solid-js/universal renderer) as the frontend reactive framework. Stripped of all real DOM and Web APIs (window, document), the JS side only maintains an ultra-lightweight component tree, utilizing signals to drive high-speed, fine-grained updates.
2. Lightning-fast FFI Binary Communication: Discards traditional JSON string serialization between JS and Rust. The JS layer packs UI mutation instructions (Opcodes) into compact binary Uint8Array frames and flushes them directly to Rust.
3. Native Rust Rendering: After receiving rendering instructions, the Rust side safely manages node lifecycles via a Generational Arena (completely preventing dangling pointers and cross-language memory leaks), and takes charge of the actual layout, style parsing, and graphics rendering.
4. Extreme Minimalism: The frontend includes a custom-built, ultra-lightweight native router (@blitz-quick/solid-router), removing all unnecessary web dependencies.

📦 Project Structure

This is a Monorepo workflow powered by Bun + Cargo:

• crates/blitz-quick/: Embeddable QuickJS + Blitz runtime library.
• crates/blitz-quick-desktop/: Reusable desktop window, event-loop, and Vello renderer integration.
• packages/protocol/: TypeScript definitions for Opcodes and EventCodes for JS-Rust communication (the Source of Truth).
• packages/core/: Low-level runtime shims (e.g., FFI bindings, patched implementations of requestAnimationFrame and timers).
• packages/solid-renderer/: The core custom SolidJS renderer. It intercepts SolidJS's createElement and similar methods, translating them into binary rendering instructions for Rust.
• packages/solid-router/: A handwritten, cross-platform native frontend router in under 50 lines of code, with zero DOM API dependencies.
• apps/demo/: The actual business logic demonstration. Uses Vite + UnoCSS to compile and bundle the bundle.js / bundle.css executed by QuickJS.

🚀 Getting Started

Prerequisites

You need the following toolchains installed:

• Rust / Cargo (Latest stable version is fine)
• Bun (For lightning-fast frontend dependency installation and building)

Running the Project

1. Install Frontend Dependencies:

   bun install

2. Build Frontend Assets & Generate FFI Code: This step executes codegen to translate the TS protocol into Rust enumerations, and uses Vite to build the UI JS bundle for the demo.

   bun run build

3. Start the Hacker News Application:

   cargo run -p hackernews

Development Mode (Hot Reloading): Run Vite and the desktop host in separate terminals:

bun run --filter hackernews dev
cargo run -p hackernews --features vite

The desktop host loads Vite's transformed ESM modules into QuickJS and forwards Vite HMR updates to solid-refresh. Accepted component updates keep the QuickJS context and unaffected Solid parents alive. Updates that require Vite's full-reload fallback currently requires restarting the application.

blitz-quick-desktop is a library rather than a standalone launcher. Rust applications construct a DesktopApp with their JavaScript, stylesheet, and native extensions; see apps/hackernews/src/main.rs for the complete host.

🛠️ Quality & Standards

This project is configured with Biome for consistent frontend formatting and linting.

• Format Code: bun run format
• TypeScript Type Check: bun run check

🌟 Acknowledgments & Inspiration

This project was deeply inspired by PocketJS. Their pioneering work in Rust-based minimalistic UI rendering and architectural design significantly influenced the direction of Blitz-Quick.

🤖 AI-Generated Code & Contributions

Disclaimer: The vast majority of the code in this repository was generated by AI. The author comes from a Rust background with limited expertise in JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystems.

We highly welcome and do not mind AI-generated Pull Requests! However, please explicitly declare that you used AI in your PR description. This helps maintain transparency and sets the right expectations during the review process.