The developer of the open-source note-taking application Aquilum has released version 0.3.0, which replaces the previous Tauri and WebView-based architecture with a custom Rust implementation. The application now uses CPU-based rasterization, significantly reducing resource consumption.
The project now consumes approximately 70 MB of RAM, compared to 650 MB in the previous version. Performance benchmarks show that a 10 MB note renders its first frame in 131 ms, down from 8 seconds. Heavy notes achieve 120 frames per second with a frame time of 3–5 ms.
The application utilizes several key libraries, including winit 0.31, Masonry (via a custom masonry_core fork), and vello_cpu 0.3. The interface, Markdown editor, graph visualization, and book reader are all written in Rust. The application supports Windows, macOS, and Linux.
The core logic, including file management, search, history, and the MCP server, is contained in the aquilum-core library. This library operates independently of the interface, which communicates via EventSink. The app uses SQLite for state management and Tantivy for full-text indexing.
To optimize performance, the developer implemented custom solutions for font rendering, glyph caching, and scrolling. The application uses SSE4.2 instructions for rasterization and a custom DXGI chain on Windows to bypass the need for heavy GPU drivers, which previously occupied about 85 MB of memory.
