rust-sciter VS QMetaObject crate for Rust

Most GUI apps don't need what Qt provides though. They mostly need stability and cross-platform support, so ... they should start with something like Tauri or Sciter, and if there is something they need natively they will be in a much better situation to pick their poison.

https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri uses OS provided WebView

https://github.com/sciter-sdk/rust-sciter uses Sciter

I seriously advise against using rust-sciter. It uses a lot of unsafe code, some of which is invalid and directly causes Undefined Behavior; see for example issue #114. rust-sciter's author doesn't seem to have any interest in fixing those. Besides, the code is highly unidomatic and looks like it's been written to resemble C++ – this is in itself not wrong, but always a red flag.

I use https://github.com/sciter-sdk/rust-sciter in my project https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk

I actually wrote Rust bindings for Qt a while back: https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs/. I'm curious to see how Qt's own take with Qt Bridges will work out. That said, I’ve since moved on and now work on Slint [https://github.com/slint-ui/slint]

Slint was created with the same idea as what drives "Qt Bridges". We made a UI toolkit that is language-agnostic from the start. Slint uses its own UI language (inspired by QML), and gives you first-class, idiomatic APIs in Rust, C++, Pyhton, and JavaScript. And a clean separation between UI and business logic.

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.