areweguiyet VS libui

The organization behind QT (QT Group) has pretty onerous licensing terms.

My understanding is that it's $3,950 per year just to develop using their libraries on your own computer if you ever in the future intend to commercialize a product using QT. Transitioning from the open source license to the commercial license is something you can do but it's not the happy path and their FAQ seems to indicate that it comes with some sort of penalty.

https://www.qt.io/pricing

Something like Slint (Rust based but includes CPP and JS bindings) is not as comprehensive (yet) but it's more modern and the licensing terms are significantly more in line with software industry norms.

GPUI from Zed is also something to monitor: https://www.gpui.rs/

Also, in general you can find an extensive list of Rust-based native UI libraries here: https://areweguiyet.com/

I would suggest that nearly every person on this website is a developer. Both C and C++ let you shoot yourself in the foot quite easily, but at least C++ has RAII.

If you're referring to Rust, it's just not there yet for anything serious: https://areweguiyet.com/

I normally use python to do some quick data analysis, with pandas/polars/pyspark/...

But I've started to use rust more and more in the last few weeks and really start to like it.

Does anyone have experience doing data analysis with rust, and would you recommend it over python?

And are there any resources like https://areweguiyet.com/ but for data analysis?

You still haven't said anything about why those existing frameworks don't count. Again, they are used in production and do exactly what a gui framework is supposed to do. Sure they may not have all the features of the frameworks that have existed a decade before rust even existed but the issue is time not rust itself. They very clearly can be used to build complex UI without inheritance. Since you mentioned it, you should probably actually look at it https://areweguiyet.com/ the page clearly says that GUI frameworks do exist in rust.

The web site https://areweguiyet.com/ has a list of GUI libraries for Rust.

I haven’t tried any yet as I lack the time, but it can be a good starting point.

Iced and Slint where interesting when I looked at that, and Slint may be done by former Qt developers.

I also hope that it is consistent with the goals mentioned at https://areweguiyet.com/

You can kind of see the desktop UI train wreck in real time here.

We started with simple stable APIs for a common look and feel. For a while these were evolved and made available in other languages. This was back when native apps were consistent and intuitive and you could… uhh… actually write and ship them without bundling giant runtimes or checking a huge compatibility matrix.

Then around 2012 the train rounds the bend and screeeeech it hits some bad track and starts to derail. UI starts trying to emulate the web, a terrible UI platform, and sane compositional UI libraries and APIs are abandoned in favor of XML soup.

Since this stuff is a trash fire, this is followed by multiple incompatible attempts to replace or fix this. Most of these are abandoned dead ends.

Meanwhile the dev community just said fuck it and went to Electron, creating today’s world where a “hello world” app with an OK button is hundreds of megabytes and has to load an entire private copy of a language runtime and rendering engine.

Versions of this comedy of errors have occurred on every other platform, and of course there has been little effort to create a cross platform UI API that’s sane beyond Qt (with its own problems) and dozens of half completed OSS projects.

So enjoy Electron I guess.

There was one sane human being who tried to do this a while ago:

https://github.com/andlabs/libui

It’s the only sane desktop UI project I’ve seen in almost 20 years, an attempt to create an actual cross platform common API. But it’s abandoned of course, likely too difficult for one dev and nobody is going to provide financial support for anything that sane.

Maybe AI will get good enough some day that we can use it to do a thing like that.

What about https://github.com/andlabs/libui

Fantastic! This is similar to the C library `libui` since it also acts as a wrapper of native libraries of each platform.

If only there was a way to interface to these using some declarative minimal and highly opinionated programming language and paradigm...

https://github.com/andlabs/libui

For the GUI you will need a library or framework that interacts with your specifiv operating system and allows you to create windows and a canvas to which you can draw. You could give libui a chance.

libui-ng is a cross-platform GUI library with native widgets written in C. It is based on an earlier, (currently) inactive project known as libui. While Rust bindings for libui have existed for years (see ui-sys and iui), there is no solution for the new libui-ng; libui-ng-sys aims to fill this role.

libui

https://github.com/andlabs/libui is very nice, but unfortunately dead, if it serves your purpose consider using it, this is a fork under development https://github.com/libui-ng/libui-ng

https://github.com/andlabs/libui

Better yet, it has excellent DSLs that make it possible to build desktop apps in a way similar to HTML, but much better due to keeping all code dynamic in one language (no static/dynamic multi-language separation/mixing dissonance):

Maybe a module that uses https://github.com/andlabs/libui or a light HTML renderer?