rust-dominator VS egui

They are both async and made for GUI -- in case of rust-signals WebGUI, provided by dominator and MoonZoon.

You shouldn’t ever need to deal with OsString itself on wasm32-unknown-unknown, since that target basically just doesn’t cover functionality that needs it, but the actual situation is genuinely worse than OsString: Rust insists on valid Unicode (as is right and proper), but the web suffers from the affliction of ill-formed UTF-16. If you blindly convert from JavaScript strings to Rust strings, you will encounter data and functionality loss in a few situations, in practice always involving IME (or similar) text entry on Windows. The first bug I filed about this: https://github.com/Pauan/rust-dominator/issues/10, and you can follow further links if you’re interested. IE and Edge used to be largely immune to this, but IE is dead and I suppose Edge will have regressed in this way with the Chromium migration, since the bug filed in Chromium a few years ago <https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=949056> has languished. (Firefox too, with <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1541349>.) In the worst-case scenario, careless use like was the case in rust-dominator will mean that some users typing with particular software in a language that’s outside the Basic Multilingual Plane will not be able to type anything.

One comparison I'm missing , which I think provides quite a nice solution in Rust, is the signals based approach popularized by Solid JS and implemented in Rust by sycamore and earlier by dominator.

Missing support for characters beyond U+FFFF is the main problem caused by surrogates (their existence, even if indirect)—it normally comes of some kind of UCS-2/UTF-16 confusion. It’s not fair to disqualify them. The only (class of) case that I’m aware of for a long time where it’s not linked to that is with MySQL’s idiotic utf8 → utf8mb3 type.

You may not have encountered such bugs, but I’m very familiar with surrogate-related bugs, because I use a Compose key extensively. I haven’t been using Windows for the last year, but from time to time I would definitely encounter bugs that are certainly due to surrogates. On the web, I found bugs a few times, all but once in Rust WebAssembly things, such as https://github.com/Pauan/rust-dominator/issues/10. And even now I’m back on Linux, I know of one almost certainly surrogate-related bug: I can’t type astral plane characters in Zoom at all; pretty sure I had this problem back on Windows, too. Copy and paste, sure, but type, no, they become REPLACEMENT CHARACTER.

The history is unfortunate but I strongly refute that they had not much choice. UCS-2 should have been abandoned as a failed experiment. Certainly there had been significant investment into it in the last few years, but with the benefit of hindsight, switching to UTF-8 (which was invented before they decided on surrogates) would have made everyone’s life much easier, especially given its ASCII-compatibility.

Ah, BOM characters. Haven’t seen one in years. Good riddance.

I really don't understand why everyone jumps to Yew when it comes to front-end development. Dominator is a far cleaner and more Rust-orientated approach to building front-end apps. I have worked with both and I feel that Yew adds a lot complexity/forces a lot of design philosophies but gives very little back in terms of advantages.

Hi, I've just released a major new version of Silkenweb. It's a signals based web framework like Dominator or Sycamore, but with the emphasis on plain rust syntax rather than a macro DSL.

Check out the alternatives without vdom, especially Dominator https://github.com/Pauan/rust-dominator. It’s faster than nearly all JS frameworks. The underlying rust-signals it’s based on is a fantastic crate. Unfortunately it’s not very well documented (check the prs for some wip docs). I got a frontend up and going with reactivity and nice styles using trunk and tailwindcss with daisyUI very quickly.

- https://github.com/Pauan/rust-dominator

How does this compare to dominator?

Probably the hardest part, if you are new to egui, is to work out how to display the widgets you want. The egui demo site is quite handy in this regard. It features the egui widgets, and has GitHub links to the Rust code used to make each widget. This will help you replicate them in your own project.

Thanks for the feedback!

It is definitely fixable. Take a look at https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/996 for some examples of how others have styled egui, or try out https://app.rerun.io/

Styling is done with `ctx.set_style`, but creating a nice style isn't very easy at the moment (basically you'll have to tweak constants in code, and then recompile). I'm working on making it easier as we speak though!

Nothing is wrong with that, it’s rather a workaround, ultimately I am trying to have one language only including the UI too (been playing with egui),so I don’t have to use JavaScript.

https://github.com/emilk/egui

FWIW, I opened an issue: https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/4046

That's fair. I don't have experience with other immediate mode libraries. It's good to hear that it's not an intrinsic limitation

https://github.com/emilk/egui?tab=readme-ov-file#layout Here the author discusses the issue directly. They note that there are solutions to the issue, but that they all come with (in their opinion) significant drawbacks.

For my use case, if I have to do a lot of manual work to achieve what I consider behavior that should be handled by the framework, then I don't find that compelling and am inclined to use a retained mode implementation.

It totally depends on what IoT and what purpose, for example:

IIoT/PLC/industrial automation: most likely you will have to use vendors software, most if the time it’s crap, and a mix of several tech stacks like MSSQL/C#/C++

Sensors and such: depends on what are you building or using the sensors: the protocol mostly is MQTT, and if you would store it in a db postrrsql, elasticsearch, surreldb, influxdb among the most I used.

Robots/drones: on what I build, I use protobuf/grpc for performance and cross-language and direct linux socket io, and where needed websocket but mostly for any web interaction rather than the protocol itself. The tech stack for those, the embedded side is up to you or sometimes based on the sdk you are dealing with, the backend/frontend however, I used to use go/nodejs and for frontend svelte or a simple js library/framework, but recently I’m shifting and redoing everything in rust, embedded, backend and frontend (using something like egui https://github.com/emilk/egui).

When it comes to IoT, I try as much as possible to stay away from python unless you are scripting something else done in go/c++/rust, look at python as a glorified bash script, it’s useful for that or other data science work, but not in IoT.

Same goes with other tech you mentioned, it might suit one case but not another, for example, MQTT is good for sensor IoT type, but good luck controlling a drone with it, mongodb might be great to store a fleet of robots with its access credentials and such, but if you try to use it to store realtime data, it might not perform as expected, and so on.

AFAIK the Rust equivalent to C++'s Dear ImGui is egui.

The creator of Rerun (Emil Ernerfeldt) also created egui [1], an immediate GUI library for Rust. The library is similar to Dear ImGui but it is written in Rust and can be used for desktop and web apps (compiles to WASM and uses WebGL, demo [2]). Desktop apps can target OpenGL (does not display correct colors on macOS, does not work in VirtualBox on Windows) or WGPU (uses native APIs for each platform, works without any problems, but the binary is a big larger).

[1] https://github.com/emilk/egui

> [...] you can build UIs that are snappy and keyboard driven.

That's not an advantage that is exclusive to TUIs; after all, you're running your TUI inside a graphical application that emulates a terminal. (Unless you're rocking an actual VT102, in which case I bow down to you.)

In fact there's an entire class of applications that are extremely snappy and keyboard driven, by their very nature: games.

Some people have taken to writing GUI apps like you'd write a game, and the effects range from OK to fantastic. Check out Lagrange (https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/), AppManager (https://tildegit.org/solene/AppManager), Dear ImGUI (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui), egui (https://github.com/emilk/egui), and many others.