fltk-rs VS druid

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.

fltk-rs worked well for me, for a small app.

Gtk doesn’t require you to write xml, you can write your gui code in Rust. You also have https://github.com/fltk-rs/fltk-rs

Currently, I have narrowed potential libraries to: 1. Flutter 2. FLTK 3. Relm (GTK) 4. iced 5. Slint 6. Imgui, Imgui-rs 7. and gtk-rs

FLTK

The fltk-rs library provides Rust bindings for the FLTK toolkit. The fltk-rs crate supports old architecture with more than 80 customizable widgets and more than four supported theme schemes, including the GTK scheme. You can also use the fltk-theme crate for more customizations.

A friend of mine grew tired of plotting libraries that did not allow adding data points to his plot interactively like you can in Matlab, so he wrote one using FLTK using C++. I refactored his code a bit and then ported to Rust using the fltk-rs crate. Recently I needed this library for a project and I noticed I had not made it publicly available on Github. So I present to you the fltk-plot library!

fltk-rs is a Rust bindings crate for FLTK, the cross-platfrom & lightweight gui library.

Besides GTK I can recommend FLTK. It has been around for a long time and is very stable.

Finally, if you’re not familiar with a front end javascript library—maybe because you’re a backend developer—You might also want to look into libraries for programming languages that you’re familiar with. There are often wrappers for existing technologies like GTK, FLTK, Qt. For example, FLTK-rs for Rust, or the GTK3 gem for Ruby.

For GUI applications, the story is mixed. There are several GUI frameworks in active development, but nothing as polished and battle-tested as Electron for TypeScript. There are bindings to GTK, but they're cumbersome to work with, and I wouldn't recommend it to a Rust newbie. There's also Tauri, which is a bit like Electron and lets you write the GUI in HTML/CSS/JS and the business logic in Rust.

Concerning GUI frameworks, the most common ones are druid, egui and iced. All three of them run native and on the Web.

Going to give a shoutout to druid. I've recently tried it with the Lapce editor and it's just so smooth, fast and works so well for a pre-alpha app.

As iced and egui were difficult for me, i started with druid.

There is Iced which is used by system76 in Pop!_OS, Druid [DISCONTINUED], GTK-rs, Relm, Azul and Tauri. Personally I would use Tauri for its speed using the OS's native web render, documentation of use with things such as Sveltekit and the ability to make UI's using JS, CSS and HTML. Tauri similarly to Electron whilst being far faster. But its up to personal preference really. There aren't any solid "go to" options at the moment.

Druid should be good for most cases, it has a lot of built-in widget for the UI, you can even make a custom widget with a canvas-alike painting API.

Druid, which is a Rust-native UI toolkit for building desktop applications targeting Windows/macOS/Linux/OpenBSD/FreeBSD, has a new version out - v0.8.

You can use GTK from Rust. But the Rust native ones aren't really there yet. [Iced](https://github.com/iced-rs/iced) which has been picked up by System76 and [Druid](https://github.com/linebender/druid) (and it's next gen version [Xilem](https://github.com/linebender/xilem)) are the ones to watch, along with Dioxus which is the main post here.

I'd expect there to be something useable by the end of 2023.

I'm using egui, and it is easy to pick up, but you might be better served by druid. It's the ui that lapce is built on, so it's definitely capable.

Druid