Add This Month in Xilem 04 (#50)

Co-authored-by: Kaur Kuut <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Simran <[email protected]>

content/blog/2024-05-01-tmix-04.md

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+title = "This Month in Xilem, April 2024"
+authors = ["Raph Levien"]
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+Again, last month saw a substantial amount of infrastructure work in the development of Xilem.
+The biggest change is landing Masonry as a crate within the Xilem repo ([xilem#203]) and adding a new xilem_masonry front-end.
+The existing xilem widget tree remains in the tree during a transitional period, but the focus of development is now on Masonry.
+
+Masonry is a principled abstraction layer within the stack.
+While it is designed to work well with the Xilem reactive architecture, it is not dependent on it.
+We'd love to see experimentation with alternative reactive frameworks, and also language bindings.
+A lot more detail about the motivation and design of Masonry is in Olivier's [roadmap blog].
+
+Two major infrastructural crates have been published.
+[Parley] is our text layout crate, supporting variable fonts and other advanced features.
+Supporting Parley is [fontique], a crate for enumerating the system fonts and making them available for itemization (choosing the right font to support a particular script).
+
+In GPU rendering land, we have written a paper on GPU stroke expansion ([arXiv][stroke expansion arXiv], [repo][stroke expansion repo]) and submitted it to a conference.
+This paper explains quite a bit of the math behind Vello's path rendering, and explains how we adapted it for high performance on the GPU.
+It's also a good time to note the [wgpu 0.20] release, which contains some work to improve on suboptimal zero initialization that will dramatically improve startup time on many platforms, including Android ([wgpu#5508]).
+It also has support for subgroups, which will unblock further performance improvements in Vello.
+
+We're very much looking forward to participating in RustNL 2024, where Raph will present a talk on Xilem.
+It looks like it will be a great opportunity to meet with other Rust UI ecosystem projects to find common ground and possibilities to collaborate.
+
+[xilem#203]: https://github.com/linebender/xilem/pull/203
+[roadmap blog]: https://linebender.org/blog/xilem-backend-roadmap/
+[parley]: https://crates.io/crates/parley
+[fontique]: https://crates.io/crates/fontique
+[stroke expansion arXiv]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00127
+[stroke expansion repo]: https://github.com/linebender/gpu-stroke-expansion-paper
+[wgpu 0.20]: https://docs.rs/crate/wgpu/0.20.0
+[wgpu#5508]: https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/pull/5508
+[RustNL 2024]: https://2024.rustnl.org/