QMetaObject crate for Rust VS femtovg

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

Femtovg (https://github.com/femtovg/femtovg) which uses OpenGL to render

Congrats! I don't want to diminish the accomplishment, but have you seen femtovg? It seems like it's probably well-aligned with your needs.

I'm currently using femtovg for vector graphics in my games, and I would like to get into bevy by porting one of my game prototypes using it to bevy.

I use femtovg It's a simple vector graphics engine having all the important features you probably want from a 2D rendering engine: simple shapes, images, text

https://github.com/femtovg/femtovg/pull/5

Before Power10 was done, IBM actually asked us Raptor users about proposals for useful machine code instructions to add to it. I replied that I’d like to have hardware UTF-8 de-/encoding but they wanted a more detailed proposal and I never got around to write it. I’m not even sure that this would be worthwhile, but I see UTF-8 de-/encoding everywhere in the code I write and would like it to approach memory read/write speeds.

I was very disappointed to learn that they had gone more proprietary with Power10 so I would not have been able to use those instructions anyway. What a pity!

In my actual code, I'm using a library called femtovg that is a Rust port of a C library for 2D rendering. But In the blog post I kept the example simple to keep it relevant for people who might want to use Web Workers + WASM for other things; didn't want to get hung up on femtovg for someone who had never heard of it. As you say, if you all you need to do is basic 2D manipulations of a canvas that are supported by the native API, then you likely don't need WASM.

You guys should also check out the femtovg project, a 2D rendering API that sixty fps relies on.

https://github.com/femtovg/femtovg

It's a decent starting point for trying to build your own toolkit.

I have recently added a wgpu backend but for now it lives in my fork https://github.com/adamnemecek/femtovg

run the demo with `cargo run --example wgpu_demo --release`.

Also join the femtovg discord https://discord.gg/V69VdVu

I'm involved with the femtovg project. We are definitely looking for contributors. Join the discord channel.

It's not a GUI framework but I'm involved with this project called femtovg, it's a Rust nanovg port. I've recently added a wgpu backend. Run the demo with cargo run --example wgpu_demo --release. Some people have been using it for their own UIs, e.g. tuix. I think that you should consider rolling your own GUI toolkit, it's not that bad and you'll appreciate the control.