Druid is a data-first Rust-native UI design toolkit that has been discontinued in favor of its successor Xilem.
Druid was built to solve the problem of creating high-quality desktop applications with polished user experiences across common platforms. Its approach centered on a data-first architecture, prioritizing performance, a rich widget library supporting diverse interactions, and native platform integration. The toolkit aimed to be straightforward to build and deploy, requiring only a single dependency that re-exports necessary components from underlying libraries like druid-shell, piet, and kurbo.
Druid is reasonably usable for a subset of applications and has significant testing history ensuring stability and correctness. However, the project is unmaintained and will receive no new features or bug fixes. The maintainers explicitly do not recommend using Druid for brand new applications. If adoption is considered despite this status, developers should verify their application does not require features Druid lacks, such as accessibility support or 3D rendering. On Linux and OpenBSD, Druid requires GTK+3, with an experimental X11 backend available on OpenBSD that currently lacks several features. The project has been superseded by Xilem, which incorporates fundamental changes enabling broader application support and improved performance while inheriting heavily from Druid's design.
Development on Druid has ceased entirely. The project no longer accepts contributions, and the team has redirected new development effort toward Xilem as the future direction of the toolkit.
