[1wd]

WPF is now open source (MIT licensed [1]), and its XAML control templates provide _as data_ a full declarative description of how a native Windows control is supposed to look like (in multiple Windows themes like Aero for Win7, Aero2 for Win10, Luna + Royale for WinXP, and Classic for Win95 look and feel [2]).

This includes everything like the exact colors and gradient stops and animation timing and vector shapes and accessibility behavior etc. of buttons and scrollbars and everything. Example: [3]

I wonder what one could learn / achieve trying to "port WPF to rust" / implement a XAML control template renderer in Rust. If you can "simply" parse and interpret those XAML files do you instantly get a native-like GUI that supports the exact look and feel of these different Windows themes? (on any OS!)

Somehow I think it is not realized how amazing that is!

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/blob/main/LICENSE.TXT [2] https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/tree/main/src/Microsoft.DotNet... [3] https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/blob/main/src/Microsoft.DotNet...

[ComputerGuru]

I’ve had similar thoughts and starting writing my own rust XAML framework with exchangeable backends (backend implementations incomplete) but didn’t find much interest from the community despite how awesome XAML is at separating the UI from the toolkit.