orbtk VS druid

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

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.

There's a memoize View node in the previous iteration of the Xilem prototype, but it hasn't made it in to the current branch yet. That sounds like what you're asking, but it's possible I'm missing something.

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.