QMetaObject crate for Rust VS ritual

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

For your inspiration to get c++ code in a crate: https://github.com/rust-qt/examples uses ritual build https://github.com/rust-qt/ritual which integrates qt c++ stuff into the above cargo qt rust examples. I would like to highlight the todo list example. Build and run it verbosely with "--verbose --verbose".

It is great to see how many people want to bring Qt support to Rust and are trying to do so, and I hope that these folks succeed, but it’s wearisome to me how they each create a new project instead of working with others who are already in this problem space. Of the half-dozen or so[0] existing attempts so far to create Qt bindings to Rust, none of them have actually succeeded because they’ve either been abandoned midway or limit their support to QML. Ritual[1] is the only crate I’ve seen that attempts to actually expose the whole Qt API, but it’s pretty awful to use, incomplete, and dead.

Rust doesn’t need more Qt crates. It needs one Qt crate that is complete and works well. (Or, ideally, a native Rust cross-platform GUI crate that works as well as Qt, but that’s an even longer and harder task.)

[0] https://lib.rs/search?q=qt

[1] https://github.com/rust-qt/ritual

Just wanted to add another vote for https://github.com/rust-qt/ritual that 0OOO00000OO00O0O0OOO/ mentioned below.

There was a QT library, rust-qt (that was officially supported I believe), the bindings being made with Ritual. There is an open issue for supporting qt6, which I'm also awaiting; https://github.com/rust-qt/ritual/issues/109.