How to share packages or libraries?

[woile]

Are there any plans on providing a way to share and consume reusable slint libraries? Kind of like cargo or pip?
I'm opening this discussion, as I've not seen it anywhere else.

Right now, for example, material-components is distributed via a zip file.

I'm no expert on this topic, I've compiled a list of options to evaluate, feel free to add more:

Use a cli to pull components

Like shadcn, as proposed in #9761

In this case, there would be a cli, that you can init and creates a config to easily set-up components, see cli. I'm not sure about the security implications of doing this.

Package manager with registry

This would involve a central repository, where people can push and pull, like npm (npmjs.com), cargo (crates.io) or pip (pypi)

Decentralized package manager

This is another take, similar to go modules or deno.
The advantage is that no infra is required, the downside is that requires tooling, and maybe some slint settings.

It would be awesome to be able to do something like this:

import { Button } from "https://pkgs.slint.dev/material-components";

Extra considerations

• Distributing slint files in principle looks doable, but what about behavior happening in rust (or even other language)?
• How to support multiple languages? If you are building a python library using slint, how would you import logic written in rust?

[ogoffart]

The tracking issue for that is #154 (although it doesn't have much information)

So this is something we'd like to have and we are thinking about it.
Especially when we were thinking how to release the material component.

One way would be to use crates.io.
For example https://crates.io/crates/lucide-slint
The problem with that is that it only works for rust, and is difficult to configure for the live-preview. So that's why we didn't use this approach for the material components.

But yeah, being able to do import /*...*/ from "https://..." or from git:// is something we thought about. Although if it needs to be shipped with native code that's a bit hard.
We could also have a project file and reference URL from there