Introduction

Ink Mini Program is a new way to connect users and services, designed specifically for smart glasses. It can be easily accessed and shared, offering an excellent user experience.

Technical Background

Ink Mini Program is built upon proven technologies but optimized for a new generation of devices.

Why this architecture?

Ink Mini Program is designed as a dynamic application solution for smart glasses.

• Power and Efficiency: To ensure optimal performance and battery life on wearable devices, we prioritized the balance between power consumption and efficiency. Therefore, we did not choose WebView or a JavaScript engine with JIT (Just-In-Time) compilation.
• Developer Friendly: To allow developers to get started quickly, we chose the WeChat Mini Program framework as the design foundation. This means if you are familiar with WeChat Mini Programs, you will feel right at home with Ink.

Platform-Specific Design

Although Ink adopts the structural framework of WeChat Mini Programs (such as the separation of logic and view layers), it is built for a completely different platform—smart glasses.

• New API Design: We decided to design the APIs based on the capabilities and interaction paradigms of the new platform. While the development experience is familiar, the capabilities are tailored for AR and wearable scenarios.

Difference from Traditional Web

Ink Mini Programs use JavaScript as the main development language, similar to traditional web development, but with key differences:

• Execution Environment: Logic and rendering run in separate threads.
• No DOM/BOM: Since there is no browser environment (no WebView), you cannot use DOM or BOM APIs.
• JIT-less: The JS runtime does not support JIT, which may affect the performance of some CPU-intensive JavaScript operations, but greatly benefits power efficiency.