QMetaObject crate for Rust VS gtk4-rs

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

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.