Red Badger launches CRUX - Headless app development in Rust

PRESS RELEASE:

Announcing Red Badger’s experimental open-source framework for writing native User Interface (UI) applications for Mobile, Web, and Desktop.

 (London) 01 March 2023: Red Badger, the Digital Product transformation consultancy for blue-chips, announces a new approach to writing custom, multi-platform applications by sharing an application’s behaviour as a single and easy-to-test Rust core that can be consumed with confidence across every UI platform.

Rust has proven itself a safe, scalable and performant language, beloved by engineers, especially as a system language. It is emerging now as the language of choice for big tech and is fast being adopted by consumer-facing enterprises. In this area, where the human interface is a critical differentiator of digital products and services, most apps need to be built three times. Once for iOS (hopefully in Swift), once for Android (hopefully in Kotlin), and once for web (hopefully in TypeScript). This approach offers no code reuse, no saving of effort, and no learning from issues.

Options available to date include React Native (with the need to think about Web separately). Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM), or Flutter (with Dart). Or hybrid with something like Capacitor with Ionic. None of these are bad choices, but they all have significant downsides. The approach with Crux is to pull the behaviour of the application into a shared core — write it once, test it once, and deploy it everywhere. This is the important part of an application — the “crux”. Making this right, means it is well-tested and consistent.

With this in place, platform-native UI (and side effects) can be placed on top, for each platform. These components are better left to the native platform anyway — nothing will beat Swift UI for building a truly iPhone-native user experience (an experience that may differ quite a bit from its counterpart on Android, for example, and certainly from the experience in a Web browser). 

The team behind the new approach believe the advantages are manyfold. With the announcement today, we hope to engage the community of engineers tackling large scale enterprise apps across multiple platforms to explore this potentially groundbreaking pattern.

Stu Harris, Red Badger Chief Scientist, said: “Here at Red Badger we spend our time solving the commercial and technical challenges faced by blue chip companies running complex digital products for millions of customers. We are constantly seeking architectures and approaches to balance development effort, safety, testability, performance, feasibility and costs. By deploying emerging technologies we impact quality, growth and sustainability outcomes in large corporates. Our work adopting Rust in the enterprise continues as we encourage exploration and look forward to cheaper, easier, safer, smarter and lighter-weight digital product platforms for industry.”

To access the codebase and documentation: github 

To see explore Crux and Rust in the enterprise: LP 

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