Elements C++ GUI library VS Slint

There's a relatively new C++ GUI library literally called "Elements". Not sure how it works though, but the way it looks, and the music background of its creator makes it appear designed for DAWs.

https://github.com/cycfi/elements

Further, if you we want a "modern" C++ GUI framework what actually would be modern would be to use mechanisms in the language itself as a quasi-DSL from within the language. This is something like what Joel de Guzman is doing with Elements

It's a complex domain. The closest we have at the moment is Elements which hasn't been proposed for Boost (yet?) but is by Joel de Guzman, the primary author of Boost.Spirit.

I ended up with elements gui https://github.com/cycfi/elements

If you don't want to use Qt I honestly think your best bet may be to become an early adopter of cycfi elements depending on your project. Elements is still rough but is useable for small applications. I think when it is finished it will be the best choice for a retained mode GUI library, but right now it is missing a lot of things (e.g. the standard common dialogs, "open", "Save as", etc.) , and has basically zero documentation.

github link

For the past year we were evaluating EFL, QML and Flutter for our embedded TV devices after having used the first two for last 5+ years and choice was made to go with Flutter. Performance is great, license is great, and development experience, judged by the whole development team, is the best. Hence my remark on being sad as QML could have had a great future, even transitioned to modern C++ without need for separate language, if there was a huge adoption and proper choices made by the company, e.g. see https://github.com/cycfi/elements.

As an anecdote, the three top contributors to sixtyfps are ex-Qt people. I think it is not anecdotal that there is at least some degree of overlap and competition between Rust and C++, and that this is a market that surely The Qt Company is watching.

SixtyFPS (https://sixtyfps.io/) is in progress for Rust, but it is still early days. It also does not technically use a native toolkit (it uses Qt), but I believe that might be on roadmap. For traditional GUI apps, I think the lack of a table or tree widget is the most limiting for the time being. They have stated they intend to remedy that.

The most promising GUI hasn't been posted here, SixtyFPS. It's in it's early stages and not FOSS, but it's built by some ex-QT cats and has a lot of potential.

People have been recommending https://sixtyfps.io/ to me.

There is already a project to make a Qt like GUI toolkit in Rust: https://sixtyfps.io/ It is really similar to Qt https://sixtyfps.io/releases/0.1.5/docs/rust/sixtyfps/index.html

People are doing that too. https://sixtyfps.io/ is basically a Qt clone in Rust, actually developed by previous Qt developers.

spdlog, a pretty useful and more and more commonly used logging library for C++.\ SixtyFPS, an emerging GUI library for Rust, but you can use it in multiple languages. It uses OpenGL or Qt currently as backend (well, it's a new library and they wanted two from the get-go to make sure their abstractions are done right/well enough). They started a company this year for it too.

Just so some are not aware, there's a new project called sixtyfps by some people who were in the Qt world for long. I didn't take a deep dive into it but it looks promising.