gtk4-rs VS orbtk

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:

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

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

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).

There are good GTK bindings for Rust (https://github.com/gtk-rs/gtk4-rs and https://github.com/Relm4/Relm4)

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

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 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.

Check out the examples in the gtk4-rs repository.

i was gonna bring up https://github.com/redox-os/orbtk only to discover it's no longer under active development.

OrbTk is sunsetting in favor of Iced, slint, and future renderer-agnostic toolkits: https://github.com/redox-os/orbtk

Orbtk

The GitLab repo was deleted. You will need to update the submodule path to https://github.com/redox-os/orbtk.

That said, I'm not totally convinced about SixtyFPS today. There are some other interesting options that are suitable GUI toolkits for Rust. Such as OrbTk and Iced. Each toolkit is approaching the GUI space in a different way, so it'll be interesting to see where we end up in a few more years. QML-esque SixtyFPS, ECS-based OrbTk, Elm-based Iced, and a few others out there.

What's written in this article isn't the development of a GTK fork, but some reasoning for exploring alternatives to GTK. There aren't very many suitable candidates in this space, but Rust GUI toolkits like Iced have potential. Personally, I would add that OrbTk is also a suitable candidate.

I use orbtk, it is pretty easy to use, has an active dev team, works on windows mac and linux, and cross compiling from linux to windows is also easy with it. It is still pretty beta, but depending on the project you need it could work. (https://github.com/redox-os/orbtk)

Orbtk is an option. The default is backend is orbraq, which uses OrbClient. OrbClient will use SDL on Linux, and on Redox it should be a "pure" rust experience.

OrbTK recompiling stuff has been fixed in the development branch as far as I can tell: https://github.com/redox-os/orbtk/pull/409

OrbTK