Making Clients

A Stardust client is at its core an executable that connects to a stardust server instance at $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/stardust-[0-32], sends and receives messages according to the Stardust protocol.

Rust

Stardust uses Rust due to its speed and reliability in build and runtime, so you will need to install cargo (preferably through rustup). If you're unsure how to use Rust then a great guide is at https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/.

stardust-xr

stardust-xr is a connecting library for servers and clients that deals with the lowest level of connecting to ensure basic compatibility is ensured. As a client developer you most likely won't need it, but it's good to know about it.

Fusion

stardust-xr-fusion is the high level library you'll probably be using to create your clients. It features structs for all Stardust objects and trait-based + async systems for handling events from the server.

Molecules

stardust-xr-molecules is an even higher level widget library built on Fusion similar to MRTK to get your clients up and running faster. Documentation will be available at https://docs.rs/crate/stardust-xr-molecules/latest.

Asteroids

stardust-xr-asteroids is a declarative UI library kinda similar to Iced (efficient functional design) and SwiftUI (direct state manipulation/saving/restoring).

This is probably what you should use to make most normal "app-like" clients because complexity is easy to manage in your state struct.

Getting Started

To get started, create a new Rust project using

cargo new

and include the crates you want to use in your Cargo.toml. Documentation will be available at docs.rs, just search for the crates you're using.