How it Works

Incarnative.js renders your app without a browser engine. There's no Chromium, no DOM, and no webview anywhere in the picture — just your .vue components, a native runtime, and the GPU.

The pipeline

inca dev/build/package all start the same way: your app is bundled with Vite, the current bundler adapter, compiling .vue templates and scripts down to plain JavaScript. Vue is likewise the current, first-class frontend framework — the architecture leaves room for others later, but none are implemented yet.

For dev and package, that bundle is then handed to the host — a native process, written in Rust on top of GPUI — which runs it and renders it:

1. Vite bundles your .vue/.mts source.
2. QuickJS, a small embedded JS engine, runs the bundle inside the host. This is where Vue's reactivity and your component logic execute — there's no browser JS engine, and no Node.js in the packaged app.
3. A custom Vue renderer turns your component tree into calls against a small native bridge (create a node, set a style, append a child, …) instead of DOM operations.
4. GPUI keeps a retained tree from those calls and draws it directly to the GPU — no HTML/CSS layout engine, no compositor in between.

Why this shape

Your app's JS only runs when something actually changes — a reactive update, an event handler. It pushes the resulting mutations to the native side once, and GPUI owns layout and painting from there. Nothing re-runs JS every frame the way a browser's render loop would.

Because there's no browser engine, .vue authoring uses a native styling vocabulary rather than CSS — see Elements & Styles for what's supported today.

Ready to build one? See Getting Started.