v0.3.6

Aura v0.3.6

This patch release switches Aura's interface to CPU rendering to reduce its baseline memory use, reduces development build artifacts, and overlaps the independent Rust and Runtime builds when generating an installer.

Changes

• The GUI now uses Iced's tiny-skia CPU renderer directly. Previously, Iced tried wgpu first and used tiny-skia only when graphics-backend initialization failed. Aura's forms and lists now avoid initializing the GPU backend even on machines with a supported GPU. Existing font, theme, image, and SVG support is retained.
• Development builds keep source-file and line information for project code and omit third-party dependency debug symbols. Incremental compilation remains enabled. This reduces generated debug data and linker work; inspecting full variable and type information in a debugger requires a build with more debug information enabled.
• The canonical installer script starts the Rust release workspace and the x64/x86 Runtime builds concurrently, using their existing output directories and dependency tracking. It waits for every build to finish successfully before staging the six executables and two Runtime DLLs. Missing native exit codes and nonzero exits fail the build. Each task and the complete packaging operation now report elapsed time.

Measured results

A Windows comparison used the same debug harness binary and real Aura state, views, and font selection, changing only the Iced backend. Both runs used a 1400 x 880 window at scale factor 1, twelve synthetic applications, and equivalent isolated configurations. After hiding through Aura's tray transition, approximately forty seconds of observation produced these stable values:

Metric	tiny-skia CPU	wgpu GPU
Private working set	26.23 MiB	149.09-149.17 MiB
Total working set	57.78-57.79 MiB	242.05-242.12 MiB
Private committed memory	29.64 MiB	261.12-261.25 MiB

In this fixture, private working set decreased by about 82% and private committed memory by about 89%. Working set describes resident memory; private committed memory is not all resident physical memory. These are fixture measurements, not a promised installed-app baseline.

With the CPU-rendering dependency configuration held constant, the GUI development PDB decreased from 188.01 MiB to 37.56 MiB, and its executable decreased from 25.93 MiB to 23.37 MiB after the debug-information changes. Existing historical build artifacts are not automatically deleted.

An earlier local installer validation with unchanged inputs and available build caches completed in about five seconds. That is an incremental packaging result, not a cold-build benchmark or a quantified cold-build speedup.

Upgrade behavior

Install the update through Settings or run the downloaded aura-setup.exe, then reopen Aura to use the CPU renderer. The installer retains local configuration and the existing installation directory. Applications previously launched through Aura continue running when the installer closes the old control process. This release adds no Profile migration and changes no Runtime hook or virtualization policy.

Validation and limitations

• GUI unit tests passed: 34 passed, 4 ignored. Application, Profile, and Settings screenshots from the CPU fixture showed Chinese text, SVG icons, lists, and forms correctly; the application-list screenshot was also compared with the GPU fixture.
• Local v0.3.6 workspace build and check passed. After supplying both Runtime DLLs, local workspace tests stopped at acceptance_ansi_default_locale_uses_profile: the injected session reported en-US where that test expects fr-FR; six other tests in that acceptance matrix passed and one was ignored. This local run is not reported as a complete workspace test pass; the uninjected Windows CI run is required before tagging.
• PowerShell 7 and Windows PowerShell 5.1 passed isolated installer-script checks for successful builds, Cargo failure, x64 configure failure, x86 build failure, and a discovered tool disappearing before execution. Failure cases did not invoke NSIS. Paths containing spaces, an ampersand, and literal percent signs were exercised.
• Local v0.3.6 packaging completed in 17.4 seconds with available build caches and validated all eight staged payloads against their corresponding release outputs, including both Runtime architectures. The GUI executable identifies itself as Aura v0.3.6. The publication workflow rebuilds the installer for the tagged commit and appends its final size and SHA-256 below.
• The rendering harness used a one-second polling subscription and bypassed the production singleton. It did not reproduce the production 200 ms tray polling interval. Both comparison processes inherited the current session's Aura Runtime; they were not uninjected host controls.
• A fresh installed v0.3.6 upgrade, high-DPI fast scrolling, and an hours-long memory observation have not been manually verified. Clean-host workspace CI on the exact release commit remains the publication gate.

Installer

• File: aura-setup.exe
• Size: 6348089 bytes
• SHA-256: c68d1985c7a7623a4cf84e52bd0b572cc41b70aa4680324ebeaa0edfdcd8ed3e