accesskit VS egui

If you were to implement this yourself, i'd look into either swash or cosmic-text for the text rendering stack (this is one of the things you really don't want to write from the ground up). For accessibility, AccessKit has quickly become the standard for communicating with crossplatform accessibility APIs in rust GUI. lightningcss (or its lower level counterpart cssparser) are both decent options for CSS parsing. Taffy handles some of what browsers offer for a layout engine, but is still being worked on.

> Fleet relies on the Java AWT/Swing framework to get a window from an operating system, but it doesn’t use the Java platform for managing its GUI components besides one JFrame and JPanel on top of it.

This is a terrible decision that is going to bite them in the long run. Doing things this way makes it far, far more difficult to implement accessibility, and regulations on this are only going to get stricter.

Implementing accessibility for a framework like that would involve three separate implementations for three separate platforms and the need to interface with D-Bus, COM and Objective C, from Java. I imagine that the latter two would be particularly difficult, considering how bad Java's FFI support is. It's not just calling methods either, you'd actually need to implement your own classes that conform to the relevant COM interfaces / Objective C protocols. There are libraries that can help with this[1], but I don't think they would work particularly well for something as complex as a code editor.

[1] https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

fltk-accesskit is an accesskit integration crate for fltk-rs, the gui crate. It's implemented as an external crate to allow for more experimentation before stabilizing the api, especially since fltk is at version 1.4.

Libraries for a lot of this stuff exist (albeit in many cases not very mature yet):

- https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text does text layout (which Taffy explicitly considers out of scope)

- https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit does accessibility

- https://github.com/servo/rust-cssparser does value-agnostic CSS parsing (it will parse the general syntax but leaves value parsing up to the user, meaning you can easily add support for whatever properties you what). Libraries like https://github.com/parcel-bundler/lightningcss implement parsing for the standard css properties.

- There are crates like https://github.com/BurntSushi/bstr and https://docs.rs/wtf8/latest/wtf8/ for working with non-unicode text

We are planning to add a C API to Taffy, but tbh I feel like C is not very good for this kind of modularised approach. You really want to be able to expose complex APIs with enforced type safety and this isn't possible with C.

There are a number of up-and-coming Rust-based frameworks in this niche:

- https://github.com/iced-rs/iced (probably the most usable today)

- https://github.com/vizia/vizia

- https://github.com/marc2332/freya

- https://github.com/linebender/xilem (currently very incomplete but exciting because it's from a team with a strong track record)

What is also exciting to me is that the Rust GUI ecosystem is in many cases building itself up with modular libraries. So while we have umpteen competing frameworks they are to a large degree all building and collaborating on the same foundations. For example, we have:

- https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit (cross-platform window creation)

- https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu (abstraction on top of vulkan/metal/dx12)

- https://github.com/linebender/vello (a canvas like imperative drawing API on top of wgpu)

- https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy (UI layout algorithms)

- https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text (text rendering and editing)

- https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit (cross-platform accessibility APIs)

In many cases there a see https://blessed.rs/crates#section-graphics-subsection-gui for a more complete list of frameworks and foundational libraries)

Using HarfBuzz makes sense. But if you're looking for a pure-Rust alternative, I hear cosmic-text (made by Pop!_OS) is good. There's also AccessKit for accessibility.

There are efforts to support a cross platform accessibility library:

https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

egui is an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI for Rust, and I just released 0.20. It's a big release!

There is now support for AccessKit (https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit) which brings accessibility to egui (a first for an immediate mode GUI?).

There is also better table support, nicer keyboard shortcut handling, better looking text in light mode (still not great, but better).

See more in the changelog: https://github.com/emilk/egui/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

Try it out at www.egui.rs

Probably the hardest part, if you are new to egui, is to work out how to display the widgets you want. The egui demo site is quite handy in this regard. It features the egui widgets, and has GitHub links to the Rust code used to make each widget. This will help you replicate them in your own project.

Thanks for the feedback!

It is definitely fixable. Take a look at https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/996 for some examples of how others have styled egui, or try out https://app.rerun.io/

Styling is done with `ctx.set_style`, but creating a nice style isn't very easy at the moment (basically you'll have to tweak constants in code, and then recompile). I'm working on making it easier as we speak though!

Nothing is wrong with that, it’s rather a workaround, ultimately I am trying to have one language only including the UI too (been playing with egui),so I don’t have to use JavaScript.

https://github.com/emilk/egui

FWIW, I opened an issue: https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/4046

That's fair. I don't have experience with other immediate mode libraries. It's good to hear that it's not an intrinsic limitation

https://github.com/emilk/egui?tab=readme-ov-file#layout Here the author discusses the issue directly. They note that there are solutions to the issue, but that they all come with (in their opinion) significant drawbacks.

For my use case, if I have to do a lot of manual work to achieve what I consider behavior that should be handled by the framework, then I don't find that compelling and am inclined to use a retained mode implementation.

It totally depends on what IoT and what purpose, for example:

IIoT/PLC/industrial automation: most likely you will have to use vendors software, most if the time it’s crap, and a mix of several tech stacks like MSSQL/C#/C++

Sensors and such: depends on what are you building or using the sensors: the protocol mostly is MQTT, and if you would store it in a db postrrsql, elasticsearch, surreldb, influxdb among the most I used.

Robots/drones: on what I build, I use protobuf/grpc for performance and cross-language and direct linux socket io, and where needed websocket but mostly for any web interaction rather than the protocol itself. The tech stack for those, the embedded side is up to you or sometimes based on the sdk you are dealing with, the backend/frontend however, I used to use go/nodejs and for frontend svelte or a simple js library/framework, but recently I’m shifting and redoing everything in rust, embedded, backend and frontend (using something like egui https://github.com/emilk/egui).

When it comes to IoT, I try as much as possible to stay away from python unless you are scripting something else done in go/c++/rust, look at python as a glorified bash script, it’s useful for that or other data science work, but not in IoT.

Same goes with other tech you mentioned, it might suit one case but not another, for example, MQTT is good for sensor IoT type, but good luck controlling a drone with it, mongodb might be great to store a fleet of robots with its access credentials and such, but if you try to use it to store realtime data, it might not perform as expected, and so on.

AFAIK the Rust equivalent to C++'s Dear ImGui is egui.

The creator of Rerun (Emil Ernerfeldt) also created egui [1], an immediate GUI library for Rust. The library is similar to Dear ImGui but it is written in Rust and can be used for desktop and web apps (compiles to WASM and uses WebGL, demo [2]). Desktop apps can target OpenGL (does not display correct colors on macOS, does not work in VirtualBox on Windows) or WGPU (uses native APIs for each platform, works without any problems, but the binary is a big larger).

[1] https://github.com/emilk/egui

> [...] you can build UIs that are snappy and keyboard driven.

That's not an advantage that is exclusive to TUIs; after all, you're running your TUI inside a graphical application that emulates a terminal. (Unless you're rocking an actual VT102, in which case I bow down to you.)

In fact there's an entire class of applications that are extremely snappy and keyboard driven, by their very nature: games.

Some people have taken to writing GUI apps like you'd write a game, and the effects range from OK to fantastic. Check out Lagrange (https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/), AppManager (https://tildegit.org/solene/AppManager), Dear ImGUI (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui), egui (https://github.com/emilk/egui), and many others.