Loading compiled Slint UIs in runtime

[furkan-guvenc]

I have a main application written in Slint and Rust and I want to load plugins in runtime which are dynamically compiled Slint UIs. Is it possible?

[ogoffart]

You can check the slint-interpreter crate. Is that what you want to achieve?

[ogoffart]

Ok, reading your message more, it looks like you want to embed them in your slint app. There is the experimental ComponentContainer element, but that's not available in stable slint yet.
(We use that for the live preview)

[furkan-guvenc]

Yes i want to embed it, plugins will be written in Rust for context

[furkan-guvenc]

As I understand from the code I can create a component from ItemTreeDescription and since it is repr(C) it can be loaded from a shared library. I am not sure that this is ideal though.

It seems there are 2 options for embedding plugin UI

• From ComponentDefinition
  In theory loading should be more performant but each plugin needs to have slint-interpreter dependency to compile it. ComponentDefinition includes everything inside and i am not sure how it will have an affect for binary size, the struct is a bit complex.

• From Slint files
  If a plugin UI imports a slint library then they also need to be included but at least they will be just strings and slint-interpreter seems very powerful. Since this way is also used in your previews, it is much easier to implement.

I am a bit lost, is there anything you can suggest me?

[ogoffart]

There is an internal type called ComponentContainer and component-factory that are used to load the live preview. But this is only enabled in experimental mode, and is right now targetted at the live preview.
The feature is tracked in #2390