kas VS QMetaObject crate for Rust

Qt classic/widgets? I'm developing Kas to offer vaguely similar features (e.g. data models, theme abstraction, custom widgets with complex event handling), though said event handling and data models are quite different. It's still got a long way to go (so API is not stable), but in case you are interested, I should be dropping a new release tomorrow.

KAS GUI

kas-wgpu looks hopeful, but there's very little information about it and I'm not even sure it works on Android.

Changelog

The next release will support dynamic linking which approx. halves the recompile time in my quick tests. This is based on Bevy which also recommends using LLD (see here); I didn't have much success with this yet however.

If you want a "native-like" toolkit like Qt but Rust-native, then Druid, KAS and Iced are the most advanced in my opinion (though all are incomplete).

Yes. It was actually a mistake (using a nightly compiler and not realising the lock-in). But in this case (with KAS still in "earlyish development" and the workaround being less concise), I decided to leave it.

This is a little library I've been using recently (original version here).

Hello, I am github.com/dhardy, maintainer of rand, former dev of OpenMalaria epidemiology simulator, author of KAS GUI and Rust enthusiast since 2013. I may be interested in positions within Europe.

You can use Rust with QML[1].

QML is actually pretty amazing. I've been building my block editor[2] view entirely in QML while the model is in C++. This separation of logic and presentation works great. And yes, there are some crashes sometimes (that I find quite easy to debug thanks to the built-in debugger), but take for example a similar app that's built with Rust and Dart[3], in my testing there were still memory leaks that caused my computer to hang. It's better to know you have a bug than for it to be hidden from you.

I agree with parent commenter, saying these cross-platform frameworks will end up supporting the least common denominator set of features. But I found with external open source libraries, the community is catching up very fast. For example, you want the awesome translucency macOS apps have for your Qt app? Here you go[4]. Many such cases. It's also pretty straightforward to add your own custom OS-dependent code, especially so, if someone already open sourced his approach. I recently wanted to move the traffic light buttons on macOS for my app, but couldn't figure the Objective-C code for that. I ended up looking at either Tauri or Electron source code and found my answer.

[1] https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs

[2] https://www.get-plume.com/

[3] https://www.appflowy.io/

[4] https://github.com/stdware/qwindowkit

I just used qmetaobject-rs and my experience with Qt/QML. There's the QML book from Qt if you're just starting, which is pretty nice https://www.qt.io/product/qt6/qml-book

qmetaobject is probably the most mature Qt Rust binding at the moment. It uses the cpp crate to embed C++ inline in Rust to create its bindings. There are some people using it and it does get some maintenance, but it's not under active development since the original author is now working on Slint.

The bindings currently use the git version of qttypes since I had to merge some upstream changes that are needed for these bindings. So they are not ready for prime time just yet.

There are a bunch of bindings with different language, but even the ones that are officially supported like PySide will still be second class citizen and awkward to use.

Automated binding generation will never give you idiomatic API in whatever language. And if you want an idiomatic library that wraps Qt, it's going to take a huge amount of work.

Which is why I think restricting to QML makes sense because that's a much smaller API surface. That was the ambition behind my previous crate that exposes QML to rust: https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs/

But now I've moved on to another GUI project: Slint https://github.com/slint-ui/slint

Whisperfish does this with Qt: https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs/issues/102

What do you want to know? It's pretty easy thanks to the amazing work of guys behind qmetaobject-rs.

This is probably the portion that I found the most difficult. The README of qmetaobject-rs gives us a basic idea of the build script, so I started with that. Here is my starting script