Rust: State of GUI, December 2022

https://kas-gui.github.io/blog/state-of-GUI-2022.html

by millyleaves • 4 years ago

211 146 4 years ago

kas-gui.github.io

phneutral26• 4 years ago

wow, really impressive!

anakaine• 4 years ago

An impressive write up and understanding of the available ecosystem and the way various things stack.

Conversely, an appalling advertisement for the state of GUIs with Rust.

exDM69• 4 years ago

More like the state of portable GUI in general, regardless of the programming language.

dfgdfgffd3• 4 years ago

Sadly Rust for WinUI3/UWP/XAML for Windows GUI - actually modern UIs on Windows - was abandoned or explicitly removed from Rust API bindings by MS.

The listed library only uses the ancient win32 api

nickpp• 4 years ago

Any idea why?! I find that the modern WinUI is impossible to use from any language other than .NET.

Santosh83• 4 years ago

Perhaps that's the plan?

withinrafael• 4 years ago

We yanked it because, sadly, XAML/WinUI is squarely designed to be used with C# and Visual Studio.

yenhoo• 4 years ago

Sadly?

I prefer desktop Windows programs to be gdi/win32, they are often the most thought out and optimized for actual desktop paradigms (i.e mouse+keyboard+high res screen) without giant margins, padding and whitespace everywhere and makes use of proper desktop class widgets like treeviews, listviews, tabs, etc.

mm007emko• 4 years ago

Exactly. Haters gonna hate me but I really liked Windows.Forms (and C#) for development line-of-business desktop apps.

dfgdfgffd3• 4 years ago

Windows offers multiple and mixed paradigms though, so ideally the UI needs to be able to adapt to and handle these paradigms

pjmlp10• 4 years ago

Doesn't surprise me, the folks behind it are the same that caused the deprecation from C++/CX, the very first time that Microsoft had something comparable to C++ Builder in productivity for C++ RAD GUI development.

It got replaced with C++/WinRT, which basically requires one to code like in the good old days of Visual C++ 6.0 alongside ATL, editing IDL files without any kind of VS tooling support and manually merging generated code.

Even the eldery MFC has better VS tooling support and COM authoring APIs than C++/WinRT.

Rust/WinRT is even years away from the C++/WinRT "productivity" in its current state, let along what .NET tooling provides, which by the way is also worse than UWP with .NET Native (e.g. no designer available, and no AOT support).

The reality is that only WinDev folks actually care enough about WinUI, the rest of us have moved on burned by these rewrites, and only a few hardcore advocates keep showing up their community calls.

onphonenow• 4 years ago

Which is a massive bummer because win ui stuff w designer etc used to be great and performed better than a lot of electron stuff and was easy to develop - but they have seriously trashed their ecosystem there

zozbot234• 4 years ago

Isn't that what the windows-rs crate is for? Doesn't seem abandoned.

yencabulator• 4 years ago

It sure is abandoned: https://github.com/microsoft/windows-app-rs#this-repository-...

fsloth• 4 years ago

win32 api is pretty good. I don't see why you would want anything else for native app development. If you want to use the modern stuff it's far better to develop the UI frontend using Microsoft tools in C# and then use Rust as the backend. In this sense Rust story is not worse than C++ or C.

If a person wants a native gui I guess QT would be worth investigating as well (unless one is concerned by the license).

dfgdfgffd3• 4 years ago

There ist at least some support for XAML via C++.

But yes, it means C# UI with cumbersome Rust interop, if you rely on a Rust SDK.

smasher1643• 4 years ago

One thing I'd like to see are Rust bindings for wxWidgets. Contrary to the prevailing opinion, I think wrappers over native toolkits are a fine approach for cross-platform development.

api• 4 years ago

Take wxWidgets and wrap or modify it to implement a reactive programming model. No need to reinvent the lower levels and wrappers around native widgets are better for many use cases.

pizza234• 4 years ago

There are pros and cons to the non-/native approaches.

Writing effective cross-platform application is harder than one would think. Some time ago there was a discussion on HN where a WxWidgets maintainer stepped in to explain why some WxWidget programs were apparently inconsistent across O/S, and the explanation was that they were developed naively (I think one needs to use specific spacing abstractions, but I don't remember with exactness).

For my personal development, I use non-native (which is easier to develop), however, on large scale, it'd be a tough decision.

WxWidget was my favorite in the past (again, for personal development), however, the bindings are very spotty, which prevents adoption for several languages (wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_bindings_for_...).

zackbrown5• 4 years ago

Contrary to the prevailing opinion

I'm not sure this is the prevailing opinion. It may be something of a "vocal minority" opinion, but it does seem more common in the Rust community than elsewhere. The closer you get to traditional native app designers and developers, the more you'll hear the opinion that native look & feel (not to mention accessibility) is important to embrace.

IMO an ideal solution is to offer both: 1. to wrap native toolkits for things like text and UI controls, and 2. to enable canvas-drawn virtual controls, for those who would prefer to create their own widgets. These approaches can be enabled in parallel through an extensible widget/component system.

nu11ptr2• 4 years ago

I think after years of agreeing with you I might actually disagree in 2022. I also prefer native widgets, but the problem is native programs have changed. It used to be they all looked very sterile and had 80-90% of the same widgets as every other OS, but if you look at apps today they are all much more media centric. Whether electron or native it is very common to have things like a "side bar" and other very specific widgets. These don't translate well to cross platform native widgets. I think Flutter might have the right approach with its fluent UI and macos libraries. I suspect the resulting app would look much more native in this day and age.

smasher1643• 4 years ago

I agree that GUIs have gotten more complicated nowadays, but I don't think the existence of platform-specific APIs is mutually exclusive with cross-platform abstractions. If anything, you should be able to specialize behavior for a certain platform.

smasher1643• 4 years ago

It looks like the author of wxRust is attempting another go at bindings with https://github.com/kenz-gelsoft/wxRust2.

logicalshift• 4 years ago

I've been working a 2D rendering toolkit that increasingly looks to me like it probably deserves a mention on these lists: https://github.com/logicalshift/flo_draw (but I'm not on Reddit...). Layers, vector sprites, dynamic textures and a streaming API that fits well with 'reactive' designs are amongst the features that make it stand out from what else is out there. It's super simple to get going too.

Started life as a rendering layer for FlowBetween so I could put in whatever looked like it was 'winning' later on but wound up writing my own renderer as there wasn't anything quite there yet. Still has that design so another unique thing is that it's possible to use the same API with whatever rendering layer you want.

Speaking of FlowBetween, one thing I have wanted to do for ages is to get rid of the platform-specific GUIs and use something universal. It should be easy because FlowBetween sends straightforward instructions to an independent GUI layer, but I keep bouncing off for a few reasons:

- it's a big ole task so I definitely want to pick something that's stable and also lets me hedge my bets in terms of being easy to migrate away from

- most commonly, FlowBetween needs pressure data from tablets and a lot of frameworks just don't do that (this is also in a terrible state in browsers)

- lots of GUI crates are designed as frameworks and so try to dictate the entire design of any app that uses them, which is no good for FlowBetween which tries to keep its internal design choices independent of its choice of GUI

At the moment, I suspect that some sort of imgui framework is best along with an entirely manual implementation of tablet pointer data: fits with my existing design and isn't 'contagious' in a way that could make it hard to migrate to something else later on.

jbk3• 4 years ago

How many of those actually look and behave like native and support accessibility correctly?

nicoburns3• 4 years ago

None yet, but that is being worked on.

Strom4• 4 years ago

What even is "native" on Windows? Is it Win32? WinForms? WPF? UWP? WinUI? Windows App SDK? There's so many to choose from and they all look and behave differently.

3232• 4 years ago

These days the native GUI for Windows is Electron.

izacus• 4 years ago

Any of those will do as long as you don't drag in javascript crap.

pjmlp10• 4 years ago

Win32, WinForms, WPF are as good as it gets, and really the only ones that matter.

UWP is deprecated, althought it keeps being the one mostly used on Windows 11, as WinUI still isn't up to its game and keeps collecting issues across all their repos.

Windows App SDK is not a GUI framework, rather the new marketing name for Project Reunion, the porting of UWP runtime infrastructure on top of standard COM without sandoxing and application identity.

jbk3• 4 years ago

Many of those are native enough, meaning they inherit the style from the desktop (and not just emulate it), do they support accessibility and so on.

For example, QtWidgets is native and qml is not. WxWidgets is, electron is not.

Macha• 4 years ago

The native toolkits, and Qt. Gtk if you're on Linux

tpush• 4 years ago

Native doesn't really exist on desktops except macOS, but accessibility is a good question.

ogoffart• 4 years ago

With Slint [https://slint-ui.com], our aim is to achieve native look and feel, and accessibility.

zackbrown5• 4 years ago

This is a core design goal for Pax. https://www.pax-lang.org

Pax composites a layer of native text and form elements on top of a canvas drawing layer. This solves accessibility across platforms, as well SEO on the Web.

This approach also enables a lean runtime footprint (<100Kb, particularly useful when targeting Web) because the runtime doesn't need to reinvent text rendering, selection, input, etc.

Still early days — have made very little noise thus far; it's pre-alpha — but you can see what's cooking at https://docs.pax-lang.org/ and https://www.github.com/pax-lang/pax

jbk3• 4 years ago

It does not answer the native styling though…

bryanlarsen6• 4 years ago

The native bindings are the first section on the list, and they work well. If you're concerned about looking and behaving native just use those native bindings.

3232• 4 years ago

10 years ago Python was famous for how many web frameworks it had.

It seems Rust will be famous for the number of GUI libraries.

littlestymaar• 4 years ago

Oh, but Rust has even more web framework than GUIs libraries;).

zackbrown5• 4 years ago

Why?

1. Rust is growing in popularity, and a compelling GUI solution is needed

2. These solutions take significant time to incubate, so many of the ones we're seeing emerge have been incubating for months or years, started at a time when there were fewer options.

3. The implications for cross-platform app development with Rust are profound, and offer us a way to break free from the pain-points and shortcomings of the local maximum solutions du jour: Web + Electron and Phonegap-style WebView mobile apps.

rtpg• 4 years ago

A pretty fun Rust GUI experienc is vgtk[0], which is doing a bunch of macro magic to give a "we're coding in React" vibe to GTK+. I don't really have a specific thing I want to code in a native GUI at the moment but if I did I think this would be the most tempting for me.

[0] https://github.com/bodil/vgtk/

fnord123• 4 years ago

Relm4 is similar.

https://relm4.org/

tristan957• 4 years ago

FYI the project is called GTK, not GTK+, these days. They dropped it late in the 3.X cycle if I remember correctly.

eklavya• 4 years ago

Flutter app with rust core works great too.

satvikpendem• 4 years ago

Yep, to be honest I don't think Rust has the manpower that Flutter has when it comes to writing a fully cross platform GUI. I simply don't expect anyone to be able to match Flutter or other similar frameworks like Qt without spending a lot of time and a lot of money.

the__alchemist• 4 years ago

Of the UI toolkits listed, it seems like Egui is nicest to use. It's flexible, has a nice collection of built-in widgets, is compatible with 3D graphics APIs (like WGPU), and has a clean API.

Lichtso2• 4 years ago

Shameless self promotion plug, I developed a GPU accelerated 2D rendering framework in Rust as well. It even comes with an experimental UI framework on top, which you can try in the browser if you have WebGPU enabled:

https://github.com/Lichtso/contrast_renderer

terhechte3• 4 years ago

Hey, I just ran the showcase locally. That looks super cool! Awesome project!

Lichtso2• 4 years ago

Thanks!

You can also checkout the "feature/ui" branch in GIT [1] to get the UI framework prototype.

[1] https://github.com/Lichtso/contrast_renderer/tree/feature/ui

bryanlarsen6• 4 years ago

Shout out to Dioxus. It's a react clone that provides a really nice experience and can run a web GUI faster than React can. That's quite the accomplishment given the disadvantage of having to use shims to access the DOM.

If you want to choose a single language that can create native GUI's, Rust is probably your best or only choice. Other languages are lacking a good story for either the web or for iOS but Rust works well on both.

mritchie712• 4 years ago

have you built anything with it? We're using Tauri, but Dioxus looks very interesting.

bryanlarsen6• 4 years ago

I have, but nothing used by more than 3 people.

anon23anon• 4 years ago

Does Dioxus run in a webview on mobile? That's how I'm reading the docs.

terhechte3• 4 years ago

I recently build this side project with Dioxus:

https://terhechte.github.io/twitvault/

Here's a review of the experience of using it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/zegv2e/comment/izb6nl...

ink404• 4 years ago

kotlin is a decent choice as well

bryanlarsen6• 4 years ago

True. I forgot about the family of languages that will transpile to Javascript. That gives most of them a good web front end story, and of course Kotlin has a good iOS story.

phkahler2• 4 years ago

KAS will never be popular so long as it can only be used with Rust apps. It's still nice to see how Rust can be used in this context, but maybe make it into a wrapper for something more flexible.

Strom4• 4 years ago

This seems like a bad take on popularity. What exactly is the criteria here? Is Qt not popular because it's not a JavaScript framework?

I think it's much more valuable to look at this from the viewpoint of the Rust GUI ecosystem, and not compare absolute numbers where nothing comes close to JavaScript .

phkahler2• 4 years ago

QT and a JS framework are used in very different contexts. If your toolkit is aiming to work on Windows, MacOS, and Linux desktops, it is directly competing with QT, GTK, and Native (on all 3, and very few apps do separate native UI). Open source works better with a larger user base, so aiming for "Window, MacOS, and Linux RUST APPS" is terribly restrictive on the number of people who will use it and hence maintain it.

I'm all for RIIR but it will take 30 years before enough has been rewritten for a Rust-only GUI to be viable IMHO.

dohdhdaa• 4 years ago

Unless a Rust OS is created with an official toolkit, Rust apps will always exist on a platform that already has a native toolkit. Any custom framework will always feel wrong and out of place.

I use macOS, so apps should be written with AppKit. For Linux they should either be GTK or Qt, depending on desktop. Recreating widgets from scratch with GPU rendering is doomed to feel wrong to users.

aaa_aaa• 4 years ago

That will probably be Fuchsia, if it lives.

pjmlp10• 4 years ago

Its official GUI toolkit is Flutter.

oDot• 4 years ago

Some apps have their own unique look and that works quite well. Doesn't feel out of place for me.

d12bb• 4 years ago

Depends. Highly specialized apps (Blender comes to mind) fare better using custom toolkits. Anything else probably should use the platform-native one, not only for looks (lots of really great mac-only apps use customized widgets, see Things as example), but feel and integration as well.

rcarr• 4 years ago

There's this:

https://www.redox-os.org

bitexploder2• 4 years ago

The only cross platform toolkit that pulls it off well is Java. IntelliJ feels good on every platform. Qt apps can also feel native if a little effort is put into it. Rust GUI frameworks are one of its weaker areas IMO.

chrismorgan• 4 years ago

I have never had anything other than a terrible experience with a Java app, under Windows, Linux (in GNOME 2 and Unity most of a decade ago, i3, or Sway). They always disregard platform conventions in both look and feel to a painful extent. But I will declare that I haven’t ever used IntelliJ, and I have no idea what it uses for its UI. But out of the box, Qt seems vastly better at matching platform look and feel, and generally gives you decent control over matching or not to match your requirements.

amatheus• 4 years ago

Regarding Java I think that's more of a Jetbrains thing that IntelliJ feels good on every platform than Java per se. Contrast it with Netbeans for a more "pure" Java desktop experience.

ptx2• 4 years ago

The next time you use a Swing app, look for these examples of how it "pulls it off well":

* The first time any particular window is opened, Swing draws the contents but then changes its mind about the window size, recalculates the layout and then redraws the contents again slightly differently.

* When Swing creates a window, you can sometimes observe how creates it in the wrong spot and then moves it to where it was supposed to be created.

* Alt-tabbing quickly between two windows in a Swing application doesn't always work. It sometimes just glitches and leaves you in the window you started with. (Confirmed just now on Windows 10 with Java 17. The bug has been there for many, many years.)

* When opening a submenu of a menu, Swing does nothing to handle the problem of the menu closing again as you're moving towards it but accidentally mouse over an adjacent item. Platform GUI toolkits solve this either with a delay or by tracking the direction of the movement. IntelliJ implements its own menu bar to make this work.

* Try to find an example of a window that is resizable in only one direction or only up to a certain maximum size. As far as I can tell, this is not possible in Swing, and applications handle this limitation by designing all UIs to be resizable even when it doesn't make any sense.

thiht2• 4 years ago

When it comes to Java GUIs, Intellij is the exception, not the rule.

Kwpolska• 4 years ago

It’s mostly an IntelliJ thing. All other Java apps are ugly and weird.

And there are non-native behaviors in IntelliJ too. For example you can’t close windows by double-clicking the window icon on Windows (a feature of Windows since Windows 1?).

meindnoch2• 4 years ago

This. It’s so lame when UI elements can’t hang outside the bounds of the window (i.e. menus, tooltips, dropdowns, popovers) because everything is rendered like a game…

nicoburns3• 4 years ago

There's no reason Rust toolkits can't use separate windows for elements like menus and tooltips, and I know this is planned for at least some of the toolkits discussed in the post.

Strom4• 4 years ago

What you are talking about has nothing to do with custom vs native controls. Instead it's a question of using a single or multiple windows.

There are Rust GUI toolkits like Druid with custom controls that have elements outside the bounds of the main window.

bsder• 4 years ago

The problem right now the separation of concerns for GUIs is a complete shitshow on ALL platforms.

Even such "simple" tasks as how to composite a window, a video in that window, and a floating menu over that window are not very well specified in any OS (try resizing that window and watch the fun). Or, for example, your floating menu--should the parent window resize itself and paint with transparent pixels in the extra area or should that menu be a separate "window"? And, what does being a "window" even mean?

Add into that the fact that we really should be making multithreaded GUI systems at this point and it's very clear that GUIs are stuck in a local minimum that's really hard to get out of because GUI systems require so many lines of code.

virtualritz3• 4 years ago

Recreating widgets from scratch with GPU rendering is doomed to feel wrong to users.

So following your argument, pretty much all apps I use on macOS are 'wrong' as far as GUI goes.

Off the top of my head from what I use most of the time: Maya, Houdini, Blender, Fusion360, Resolve, Darktable, Slack, Discord, VSCode. Not a single one of them uses native Cocoa widgets. And I couldn't care less.

Some of these are top of the line apps for 2D/3D content creation on that platform.

If the vendors of these apps can afford to not care about UI nativeness, why should any single one or small group of developers working their asses off on GUI crates for Rust? Mostly unpaid no less.

lelanthran• 4 years ago

So following your argument, pretty much all apps I use on macOS are 'wrong' as far as GUI goes.

MacOS apps feel pretty wrong to me.

Some don't remember which screen they should be on, and always go to that screen at a predetermined size and geometry (tkdiff).

Others expand incorrectly to full-screen (macvim) when moved to a different screen.

VSCode doesn't behave like the native apps.

The list goes on, I'm short on time.

And I couldn't care less.

You caring or not doesn't make the problem go away - native widgets always feel less wrong than non-native widgets.

rollcat3• 4 years ago

Not a single one of them uses native Cocoa widgets. And I couldn't care less.

Meanwhile I do care. My main reason being: macOS offers fantastic facilities for inspecting and scripting the native GUIs, think using the web inspector or GreaseMonkey, but across the entire OS - but of course it breaks e.g. on Electron apps. Other people will cite help menu integration, custom key shortcuts, accessibility (not only for the disabled), and - yes, resource usage. I remember being productive on a system with 256M of RAM, and before that - 4M, and before that - 64k. It's frustrating to see so much progress wasted, I shouldn't need to close ALL of the chat apps just to run StableDiffusion more smoothly.

hollerith• 4 years ago

Maya, Houdini, Blender, Fusion360, Resolve, Darktable, Slack, Discord, VSCode. Not a single one of them uses native Cocoa widgets.

Also Firefox and Chrome and their forks (e.g., Brave).

pg999w• 4 years ago

There are plenty of apps written with Electron, which has styles far from "native" UI. But most people should not think of them as wrong.

nicoburns3• 4 years ago

Unless a Rust OS is created with an official toolkit, Rust apps will always exist on a platform that already has a native toolkit.

If the toolkit is good enough it's entirely possible that a platform or platforms may adopt it as their native toolkit. In any case, these are really competing with electron which is already non-native. If Rust toolkits can get to electron-like quality but with lower resource usage and better hooks into the underlying platform then I'd consider that a success.

madeofpalk• 4 years ago

In any case, these are really competing with electron which is already non-native

Use Electron and you'll get OS-native buttons and other form controls.

pjmlp10• 4 years ago

With exception of VSCode, the only Electron apps that I use are forced upon me due to work requirements.

All of them I glady ignore on private owned computers, or use the browser version, they are anyway Web apps.

silon422• 4 years ago

For Linux they should either be GTK or Qt, "depending on desktop"

That's bad... ideally there should be a runtime choice between GTK / Qt.

side note... I know many people that would prefer apps on MacOS to behave like Windows/Linux (mostly about the keyboard)... and also the reverse (those are louder to complain, but a minority in my case).

bobajeff• 4 years ago

It seems to me Mac users care about using native UI toolkits more so than Linux or even Windows users. I would suppose that has to do with how polished and integrated that platform is.

As a Linux user I really don't care if you use GTK for the UI. I've long given up on customizing the look and feel of my system to the point that application integration matter.

mistrial9• 4 years ago

long ago, the integrated feeling of Apple MacOS was a great selling point; decades later, daily use of the web, more phone than desktop, Windows low-bar junk and other factors change the equation.

If a smart user here today says that recent network-centric apps are OK with him visually, then maybe they are OK?

troad• 4 years ago

For many decades, there have existed commercial apps native to the Apple ecosystem, often from small/mid-sized studios, which would use native UI to signal their premium craftsmanship. I think that for many long-time Mac users, seamless/native UI is still a signal of quality in third-party software. However, this sentiment is moribund. That entire market is now dwarfed by the ecosystem of “cross-platform apps” (formerly Windows ports, now usually web apps) and Unixy OSS tools; all the while the Mac App Store now peddles lots of native-UI apps of deeply questionable quality.

ruph123• 4 years ago

You can write GTK applications in Rust: https://www.gtk.org/docs/language-bindings/rust/

dpcx• 4 years ago

You can, but its documentation is (was?) a horrid mess of C examples that make it quite difficult to navigate.

zorr3• 4 years ago

I think, now in 2022 it is time to let go of this idea (for cross-platform applications). What you propose means that any app that wants to be available on "all" desktop platforms has to be written at least 4 times (macOS, Windows, GTK, Qt) and few developers or organizations have the resources for that.

Recreating widgets from scratch with GPU rendering is doomed to feel wrong to users.

Yes, and no. When these widgets try to mimic platform-native widgets we have the uncanny valley problem which makes everything feel out of place like you describe. But if we drop this constraint and design widgets with their own consistent style within the same app, we don't have this problem. Apps like the JetBrains IDE's and Todoist show that this can be done.

To me the middle-ground solution is a UI toolkit with its own widget style, that has some tie-in with platform-native things and conventions like windows, menus, notification trays and keyboard shortcuts. Essentially GTK or Qt without the focus on pixel-perfect matching of platform-widgets. I think this is what Druid is doing. Rust is in a good place for this as it is a modern language that works well on all of these platforms, with no native UI toolkit yet and a package-manager/build-system that supports multi-platform library configuration.

There will always be a place for platform-native apps but cross-platform apps have different requirements. I don't care that my todo list application or IDE does not look exactly "native" on my Macbook. However I do care that these applications look and feel similar when I use them on my Macbook vs on my Linux machines or Windows laptop. Preferably without dragging in a full web-based rendering engine a la Electron.

dmitriid• 4 years ago

But if we drop this constraint and design widgets with their own consistent style within the same app

Style is just one of many things. And it's extremely hard to properly code your own consistent UI toolkit.

On top of that every platform has a myriad of platform-specific behaviors that people expect and that you will get wrong in yours. Accessibility is the big elephant in the room. But even things like secondary focus in prompts/dialogs on MacOS (that Apple's own Catalyst and Swift forget about) is a bitch and a half to get right.

cmrdporcupine2• 4 years ago

The problem with this is unless you drag in something like Electron, you're inevitably going to end up using (or writing) something that just doesn't have the number of maintainers and quality development as either the native UI or an embedded webview. There's nothing with the level of development of e.g. Qt for Rust.

Which means "unsexy" things like accessibility get left by the wayside. And your users suffer.

Writing a UI kit is a huge task. It's one of those things (like so much else in our industry) where you can fairly quickly climb "stupid mountain" by getting a pile of shiny widgets on the screen; but then you look out over the valley below and realize that, holy, crap there's a whole other mountain range of things that a UI kit has to do.

It's also a tough story for Rust, in particular, because copying what other people have done with other toolkits won't really cut it. Rust's ownership semantics and general opinions don't necessarily accord well with the highly object oriented and event-loop / object-tree structure of most existing GUI toolkits.

Aside: I still don't understand why things like Electron based apps are so bloated. They seem to static link whole chunks of their own (forked) Chromium. But both Windows and Mac OS ship native webview components as part of their system which can be used instead. I've done this myself (used Edge's Chromium webview component in a VST synthesizer, and equiv webkit stuff on Mac) and binary sizes were entirely reasonable. Linux was a slightly more complicated story.

thiht2• 4 years ago

Any custom framework will always feel wrong and out of place

Pretty sure that's the wrong metric. Users don't care if the interface doesn't look exactly like the rest as long as it's good looking and feels familiar.

As a heavy VSCode user for example, I don't think it feels out of place on a mac for example. The UI is consistent in itself, and the UX is consistent with the global UX of the OS (more so than some native mac apps like Finder for instance).

The main reason I hated Java Swing apps was that they were ugly as hell, not that they didn't feel native.

bryanlarsen6• 4 years ago

The first item on the list is cacao, the rust bindings for AppKit. And that is IMO the best option for building MacOS apps in rust.

Klonoar• 4 years ago

I'm the author of cacao, which is the first thing in this blog post - and is a Rust wrapper around native AppKit. Anything built with it feels fine on macOS and gets most things "for free", but the issue is that nobody wants to write AppKit anymore. ;P

You can blame a variety of things for this, but it's the reality. Apple doesn't really make it easier with the newer UI approaches creeping in.

robertkrahn01• 4 years ago

https://github.com/gabdube/native-windows-gui isn't in the list but is quite a polished option for building Windows specific GUIs. Seems to be the more mature option compared to winsafe.

cultofmetatron• 4 years ago

I for one would love to see a toolkit akin to the user interface in blender. It would be a boon to anyone building 3d applications where high performance is necessary. (the kind of thing you'd probably want to use rust for anyway.)

intelVISA• 4 years ago

Is there a decent immediate mode GUI for Rust? Think ImGui, I know of eGui but unsure how workable it actually is in reality.

rollcat3• 4 years ago

I've only had a very brief encounter with eGui (using Python+ImGui on a project), but I was very positively impressed by it. If we were starting that project today, we would've gone with eGui.

joshka3• 4 years ago

Anyone have a recommendation of what they'd use to run on a raspberry pi with a touch screen? My preference would be booting direct to the gui and having no other things running (i.e. X11 / etc.) as well as having a good development story for macOS. Is there something decent that enables this for rust? Bonus points for github example repos.

kevin_thibedeau• 4 years ago

Qt is the most mature system for running on a framebuffer.

eYrKEC2• 4 years ago

I second this. I wrote an internal Qt/QML app that ran on Windows, Linux, Android, and Raspberry Pis. We had ~20 Raspberry Pi's running this app in kiosk mode. If only KDAB/cxx-qt[1] were ready then, I would have done as much as possible in rust .

- [1] https://github.com/KDAB/cxx-qt/

joshka3• 4 years ago

That's pretty much the conclusion I'd come to when doing initial research. Good to know that others think the same. Mostly this is for the somewhere in the future type project we all have.

worik3• 4 years ago

My favourite GUI is and always will be the command line.

catfishx• 4 years ago

Um, what? Thats like saying "My favourite car is and always be my bike"

worik3• 4 years ago

"My favourite car is and always be my bike"

It is

fschuett• 4 years ago

One day I'll get around to finish my library Azul [1]. Hopefully.

[1] https://azul.rs/

Rust: State of GUI, December 2022

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