egui VS gtk4-rs

Compare egui vs gtk4-rs and see what are their differences.

egui

egui: an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI in Rust that runs on both web and native (by emilk)
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egui gtk4-rs
203 22
19,719 1,662
- 3.5%
9.8 9.6
1 day ago about 6 hours ago
Rust Rust
MIT OR Apache-2.0. MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

egui

Posts with mentions or reviews of egui. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-27.
  • Egui 0.27 – easy-to-use immediate mode GUI for Rust
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Mar 2024
    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!

  • Rust for Embedded Systems: Current State, Challenges and Open Problems
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Mar 2024
    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

  • We sped up time series by 20-30x
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Feb 2024
    FWIW, I opened an issue: https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/4046
  • Immediate Mode GUI Programming
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jan 2024
    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.

  • Egui: Immediate mode GUI in Rust on web and native
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Dec 2023
  • Ask HN: What software do you use for IoT devices and server
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Dec 2023
    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.

  • GUI library for fast prototyping
    3 projects | /r/rust | 6 Dec 2023
    AFAIK the Rust equivalent to C++'s Dear ImGui is egui.
  • Rerun 0.9 – a framework for visualizing streams of multimodal data
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Oct 2023
    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

  • Textual Web: TUIs for the Web
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Sep 2023
    > [...] 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.

  • My Journey Away from the JAMstack
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Jul 2023
    Honestly, frontend development especially with all these crowded frameworks and libraries always confused me so pardon my ignorance, which is why in a project I’m working on right now I’m trying not to use js, instead I’m using egui [1]

    Zola is a static site generator and it’s crazy fast, using one binary only [2], also there’s Blades [3], same concept but supposedly faster, never tried it though.

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

    [2] https://www.getzola.org

    [3] https://getblades.org

gtk4-rs

Posts with mentions or reviews of gtk4-rs. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-08-23.
  • Integrate with Skia GL
    2 projects | /r/GTK | 23 Aug 2023
    The only example that shedded some light on the integration was gtk4 + femtovg. So I mimicked the example, using gtk4-rs and Skia's rust bindings. I had some code similar to the following inside a subclass of GLArea to setup Skia's DirectContext, but it failed:
  • error[E0432]: unresolved import `gtk::FileDialog`
    1 project | /r/learnrust | 31 Jul 2023
    Hi, I am studying gtk4 with rust, now trying to check examples from https://github.com/gtk-rs/gtk4-rs/tree/master/examples some of them are building and compiling but text_viewer(cargo run --bin text_viewer) and some others are failing with the error below
  • How do I use ColumnView ?
    1 project | /r/GTK | 14 May 2023
    I created a demo of using column view in gtk4-rs rust here...maybe be a point of reference https://github.com/gtk-rs/gtk4-rs/tree/master/examples/column_view_datagrid
  • GUI development with Rust and GTK 4
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Apr 2023
  • My (challenging) experience building a window switcher for Ubuntu
    6 projects | /r/rust | 5 Mar 2023
    To build the UI, I used gtk-rs. My experience with this library was quite pleasant; it was easy to use and there were a lot of examples. However, it isn't as widely used as, say, React, so it was difficult to find answer on Stack Overflow (I come from a JavaScript/Typescript background).
  • Are there any good UI/GUI libraries out there?
    8 projects | /r/rust | 30 Nov 2022
    There are good GTK bindings for Rust (https://github.com/gtk-rs/gtk4-rs and https://github.com/Relm4/Relm4)
  • GTK4 + Rust + GLArea: How do I set the opengl version?
    1 project | /r/GTK | 6 Nov 2022
    I've been following this example to get something that works for whatever the default opengl context version is, however, I can't figure out how to request a specific opengl version on context creation: https://github.com/gtk-rs/gtk4-rs/tree/master/examples/glium_gl_area
  • Rust for Linux can be compiled with GCC codegen(only few hacks are needed)
    2 projects | /r/linux | 9 Oct 2022
    gtk4-rs itself feels like it takes very little time to build: https://github.com/gtk-rs/gtk4-rs but when you add up all the time to building all examples afterwards, it's about the same and provides the equivalent of capabilities of QT(C++ and RUST) so yes it's going to take time to build.
  • The state of Rust GUI libraries
    9 projects | dev.to | 17 Aug 2022
    The gtk-rs project provides safe Rust bindings for GNOME stack-based libraries, like the GTK 3 and GTK 4 libraries. The gtk3-rs and gtk4-rs libraries provides GTK 3 and GTK 4 functionalities, respectively.
  • Any good resources for using Rust with GTK4 and Libadwaita?
    3 projects | /r/gnome | 12 Mar 2022
    Check out the examples in the gtk4-rs repository.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing egui and gtk4-rs you can also consider the following projects:

iced - A cross-platform GUI library for Rust, inspired by Elm

tauri - Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web frontend.

imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies

fltk-rs - Rust bindings for the FLTK GUI library.

cef - Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). A simple framework for embedding Chromium-based browsers in other applications.

druid - A data-first Rust-native UI design toolkit.

Slint - Slint is a toolkit to efficiently develop fluid graphical user interfaces for any display: embedded devices and desktop applications. We support multiple programming languages, such as Rust, C++ or JavaScript. [Moved to: https://github.com/slint-ui/slint]

slint - Slint is a declarative GUI toolkit to build native user interfaces for Rust, C++, or JavaScript apps.

gtk-rs - Rust bindings for GTK 3

Relm4 - Build truly native applications with ease!