Documentation

Welcome to the official Zylix documentation. Zylix is a high-performance, cross-platform UI framework powered by Zig, designed to build native applications that run on Web, iOS, Android, macOS, Linux, and Windows from a single codebase.

Why Zylix?

Modern cross-platform frameworks often sacrifice performance for developer convenience, or require complex toolchains that slow down iteration. Zylix takes a different approach:

• Zero-Cost Abstractions: Written in Zig, Zylix provides predictable, garbage-collection-free performance with compile-time safety guarantees
• True Native Performance: No JavaScript bridge, no virtual machine overhead. Your UI code compiles directly to native machine code
• Unified Architecture: A single Virtual DOM implementation powers all platforms, ensuring consistent behavior everywhere
• Minimal Bundle Size: Core library under 50KB. WASM builds are incredibly small and load instantly
• Platform-Native Look & Feel: Each platform uses its native UI toolkit (SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose, GTK4, WinUI 3) for authentic user experiences

Architecture Overview

  flowchart TB
    subgraph Platform["Platform Shells"]
        SwiftUI["SwiftUI<br/>(iOS/macOS)"]
        Compose["Jetpack Compose<br/>(Android)"]
        GTK4["GTK4<br/>(Linux)"]
        WinUI3["WinUI 3<br/>(Windows)"]
        HTMLJS["HTML/JS<br/>(Web)"]
    end

    subgraph Binding["Binding Layer"]
        CABI["C ABI"]
        WASM["WebAssembly"]
    end

    subgraph Core["Zylix Core (Zig)"]
        subgraph Row1[" "]
            VDOM["Virtual DOM"]
            Diff["Diff Algorithm"]
            State["State Store"]
            Comp["Component System"]
        end
        subgraph Row2[" "]
            Event["Event System"]
            Layout["Layout Engine"]
            CSS["CSS Engine"]
            Sched["Scheduler"]
        end
    end

    SwiftUI --> CABI
    Compose --> CABI
    GTK4 --> CABI
    WinUI3 --> CABI
    HTMLJS --> WASM

    CABI --> Core
    WASM --> Core

Quick Links

Supported Platforms

Core Features

Virtual DOM Engine

Efficient UI updates through intelligent diffing. Zylix computes minimal patches between UI states, ensuring only necessary DOM operations are performed.

Type-Safe State Management

Centralized state with compile-time type checking. State changes are tracked with version numbers, enabling efficient change detection and time-travel debugging.

Component System

Composable, reusable UI components with props, state, and event handlers. Components are lightweight structures with zero runtime overhead.

Cross-Language Bindings

Seamless integration with platform languages through C ABI (Swift, Kotlin, C#) and WASM (JavaScript). All core logic stays in Zig while platforms handle rendering.

Community & Support

• GitHub: github.com/kotsutsumi/zylix
• Issues: Report bugs and request features
• Discussions: Ask questions and share ideas
• License: MIT

Version

This documentation covers Zylix 0.1.0 (Development Preview).