Ergonomic APIs for Hard Problems - Five Techniques for Improved Design

Explore the challenges and solutions in designing ergonomic APIs for complex problems in Rust through this 53-minute keynote from the RustLab Conference. Delve into the evolution of the Druid architecture and the promising Xilem architecture for UI toolkit development. Discover five powerful techniques driving GUI architecture that can be applied to improve API design across various domains. Learn about composable traits, staged context, impl Trait on tuples, fluent API patterns, and optional type erasure. Gain insights into creating clean, beautiful, and flexible interfaces while leveraging Rust's performance and reliability features.

Intro
Designing good Rust APIs is hard
Some problems are inherently hard
History of attempts
Things we avoided
Xilem architecture
Patterns that make Xilem work
Composable traits
Composable trait: Iterator
Xilem View trait
Staged context
impl Trait on tuples
Fluent API/builder pattern
Fluent API: extension trait
Optional type erasure: AnyView trait
Optional type erasure: blanket impl
Optional type erasure: downcasting