Thread

ArtCraft Apps – open-source Adobe compatible suite written in Rust

98 points · 99 comments · aghuang

echelon · 1791162243 · focus · HN ↗
Haha, I wasn't ready to post this to HN. It's not anywhere close to ready. But thank you aghuang. (I want to post this again when we clear Beta phase.)
These are still super early alpha. All MIT/Apache licensed. No telemetry.
I'm going to try to drive these to 100% parity but it's going to take a minute. And I'll need lots of help. (Anyone want to join me? I'll pay stipends and bug bounties.)
I'm going to do Microsoft Office, AutoCAD, and Solidworks too. Probably a lot of stuff to collapse.
It's not just SaaSocalypse. Everything can be open source multiplatform Rust now.
Party like it's 1999 and the Internet / tech scene belongs to us again. We can literally deenshittify the world without breaking a sweat.
1. nayuki · 1791162657 · focus · HN ↗
  This project looks extremely ambitious. Are these applications coded by AI by any chance? I can't find any easy documentation about the development process.
  1. slopinthebag · 1791163996 · focus · HN ↗
    are you kidding? its all vibe coding
    alwillis · 1791177980 · focus · HN ↗
    > are you kidding? its all vibe coding
    Disagree.
    There's a difference between "vibe coding" and incorporating AI into a software development process. Hobbyists vibe code for shits and giggles on the weekends.
    These guys incorporated dozens of pre-existing Rust packages into their codebases, made sure the apps ran on macOS, Windows and Linux and in modern web browsers. That’s not vibe coding.
    Did they use coding agents to assist them? Of course! No different than teams at Microsoft, Google, Adobe, etc. Re-creating Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, InDesign, etc. from scratch in Rust is a huge undertaking; one that would have been impossible just a couple of years ago.
    slopinthebag · 1791180677 · focus · HN ↗
    no, they're vibcoding. they aren't looking at the code or even testing the output themselves.
  2. praet · 1791164754 · focus · HN ↗
    They are clearly all vibe-coded
2. 4b11b4 · 1791162716 · focus · HN ↗
  I like this mindset but damn that's a lot of tokens? At what cost? And then to continue to maintain and .. idk.. I suppose it'll work? If the motivation is strong enough and momentum is sustained?
  1. echelon · 1791162992 · focus · HN ↗
    Only have to pay the price once.
    I'm sick of Gimp, Krita, and Inkscape being the best Linux and open source have to offer.
    dofm · 1791163571 · focus · HN ↗
    I m not really a fan of GIMP but Krita and Inkscape are both serious and competent apps with their own principles and features, made by people who care and who seriously understand their knowledge domains, and I would rather have either than AI-slop clones of Adobe apps that enshrine Adobe’s dated workflows in open source that no human wrote.
    I think you can do this project of yours without being dismissive of the work (and the merits of the work) done by real people over years.
    Be careful of what you might damage by doing this.
    amlib · 1791165850 · focus · HN ↗
    >I think you can do this project of yours without being dismissive of the work (and the merits of the work) done by real people over years.
    Specially when the LLMs he is using to make this software were 100% trained and likely heavily influenced by the software he is shitting on.
    alightsoul · 1791171573 · focus · HN ↗
    Those dated workflows are what people seem to want, they say any creative app that doesn't behave like adobe is not worth considering
    dofm · 1791174722 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe.
    Affinity works both similarly and differently and is now pretty popular.
    It’s different but really not inferior to Photoshop, for example (better live filters, cross model curves, better layer blending), and it’s not inferior to InDesign or Illustrator, mostly. It does have a file format that allows all three to coexist (in fact it effectively always did).
    They all have sufficient familiarity (the basics of the tools and layers are now pretty much a standard “medium” that most photo/painting apps implement, after all) but they have their own advantages. The integration between the three apps is way ahead.
    I just don’t see why anyone would make open source apps that don’t move things forward (Krita and Inkscape do, in their own ways).
    It’s also a pretty hollow demonstration of AI, ultimately, to use it to just clone ripoffs, but it does have a sort of fractal self-similarity I suppose.
    alightsoul · 1791175546 · focus · HN ↗
    Affinity is not open source so there's that. There should be an OSS Photoshop drop in alternative like affinity tries to be
    dofm · 1791175925 · focus · HN ↗
    Is there an open source “drop-in alternative” for really any desktop app of substance? Plenty of excellent alternatives, very few that drop in and don’t have some kind of conceptual differences (even LibreOffice, which after all started as a closed source app).
    I don’t think anyone is served well by pursuing blatant cloning in open source. But if this is the shoddy destiny of AI coding then I am at peace with it. People can use lazy knockoffs if they want.
    [deleted] · 1791165870 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    brazukadev · 1791166894 · focus · HN ↗
    I'd need to give at least some 10 years of your life to achieve this. GIMP, Krita and inkscape are amazing projects.
    nozzlegear · 1791183854 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
3. fschuett · 1791163384 · focus · HN ↗
  Just wanted to say at least for the non-creative apps I am already doing that at <a href="https://azul.rs" rel="nofollow">https://azul.rs
  But its a lot harder if you want to maintain at least some level of quality. For example, your PDF export exports texts as paths and correct PDF encoding and font subsetting took months of trial and error (I maintain the printpdf crate).
  So you have to actually use your apps, test extensively, etc. - don‘t underestimate the effort required for QA and testing.
4. diffstrokes · 1791163517 · focus · HN ↗
  Amazing work!
5. qchris · 1791163715 · focus · HN ↗
  I'd love to see something like this for Solidworks, but think you're in for a boatload of trouble there. OpenCASCADE is less capable than Parasolid, and a true Rust-based parametric geometry kernel capable of boolean joins, fillets, etc. needed for anything resembling a modern feature set is wickedly difficult (that's one of the reasons why everyone licenses existing ones and don't try to roll their own).
  Don't let that discourage you, though! A fast, local, fully-featured 3D parametric CAD program that takes advantage of modern hardware parallelism that can be extended/scripted is just basically one of the holy grails of software and even exploratory efforts might uncover some great paths forward to making that a reality!
  1. dofm · 1791164611 · focus · HN ↗
    Indeed. If you are going to burn tokens to clone something, then assembling a team of people who could help you burn those tokens in service of a bRep kernel (let alone a Parasolid kernel) would be an interesting undertaking.
    With photoshop, illustrator, etc., there’s a fair amount of code out there. No LLM has however ever seen the source code —- or I suspect even much detailed discussion —- of a bRep kernel better than Opencascade, but with the right people to decide what maths to work on, maybe there is progress to be made. This knowledge is held by few people, many of whom will now have retired!
  2. brookst · 1791164664 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s not what you’re after but onshape is pretty respectable, and the free offering is decent.
    qchris · 1791165653 · focus · HN ↗
    I've played around with most of the solutions in this space (OnShape, Fusion360, FreeCAD, Solvespace), but honestly at this point would probably just end up paying for the Solidworks hobbyist license; it's like $4/month and I have a Windows desktop available. That said, there's been some consensus built over the past few years about what the next-gen CAD software should probably look like, ranging from modern scripting capabilities to version control and intermediate shape representations.
    A big of the attraction of re-building this kind of foundational software isn't the base capability (commercial 3D CAD has barely even seen incremental improvements for more than a decade, in large part because it's just pretty well solved in the existing programs), but that a modern kernel would be a major step forward for unblocking implementation of some of those other capabilities.
6. rancar2 · 1791164392 · focus · HN ↗
  The videos of the features are very well done, and it looks like there is a unified vision, which is not what any of the other products have. Did Google copy some of the UI/UX? I was curious where their inspirations were, and I think this may have been it.
  I look forward to the beta and beyond!
7. cjonas · 1791164627 · focus · HN ↗
  Despite whatever else happens with AI, I am excited about the near future where we have an open source version of basically every app. I hope this is the beginning of the end of the subscription model. Keep it up!
8. [deleted] · 1791165293 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
9. timschmidt · 1791165496 · focus · HN ↗
  > AutoCAD, and Solidworks too
  You may want those in new high-performance infinite precision: <a href="https://github.com/timschmidt/hyperreal" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/timschmidt/hyperreal
  Exact curves: <a href="https://github.com/timschmidt/hypercurve" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/timschmidt/hypercurve
  Meshes: <a href="https://github.com/timschmidt/hypermesh" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/timschmidt/hypermesh
  and more in the ~22 crate stack.
  1. echelon · 1791179735 · focus · HN ↗
    This is fantastic! Thank you for building these and pointing me in this direction.
    I'll be pinging you about this in the future
10. adzm · 1791166823 · focus · HN ↗
  Do these expose a scripting API? ExtendScript is basically ecmascript3 used in Adobe apps, would be cool to have modern js available
11. hedgehog · 1791167676 · focus · HN ↗
  I'm doing a run at rebuilding a few of Apple's bundled apps (iPhoto, iTunes, Mail) as they were back around 2015, the replacements are much worse in the ways I care about so at this point rebuilding as GTK + Rust seems like a worthwhile experiment. I only started last week though so I don't have a sense of how long it will take yet.
12. alightsoul · 1791171378 · focus · HN ↗
  LibreOffice could see some UI and compatibility work, the compatibility work is mostly done
13. someothherguyy · 1791177356 · focus · HN ↗
  > Party like it's 1999 and the Internet / tech scene belongs to us again
  we remember different 1999s. i remember everyone pirating software made by large companies at that moment in time
14. hypfer · 1791180823 · focus · HN ↗
  The prospect does sound interesting, but if you truly push through with that, I hope that you have a capable legal team.
  Someone will make up new laws just to get rid of that specifically and that will likely even work, if one guy is behind _all_ the recreations.
  Maybe you could somehow distribute that, so that it's at least a game of whack-a-mole for the defender.
  __
  This btw is made orders of magnitude worse by the fact that you are trying to make money off those recreations, and you're doing so right now.
  So the whole "I was just a foss & rust absolutist" defense doesn't count.
  So.. eh. Idk man. Icarus with a claude jetpack I guess.
  ___
  Also, keep in mind the sums of money that are involved in what you're attacking there.
  Those are software companies with leverage of a small country. They can also simply just disappear you if you fuck with them too much. Which is not hyperbole.
  That's so much money, it bends the rules of reality you think you have outsmarted.
  1. echelon · 1791182220 · focus · HN ↗
    > you are trying to make money off those recreations
    These are not monetized in any way. They don't have telemetry, paywalls, or anything.
    If you're looking at the other software we've built, that's a source available (soon to be open source) Higgsfield and OpenRouter/FAL.
    hypfer · 1791182436 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://getartcraft.com/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://getartcraft.com/pricing exists
    Yes, I know what you're going to say that it's technically something different, but, really, man.
    The people you're messing with cannot simply be outsmarted on technicalities in the way a "HN contrarian" would win a debate on this platform.

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