slint VS QMetaObject crate for Rust

Compare slint vs QMetaObject crate for Rust and see what are their differences.

slint

Slint is a declarative GUI toolkit to build native user interfaces for Rust, C++, or JavaScript apps. (by slint-ui)

QMetaObject crate for Rust

Integrate Qml and Rust by building the QMetaObject at compile time. (by woboq)
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slint QMetaObject crate for Rust
137 20
14,640 594
15.2% 2.9%
9.9 6.5
2 days ago 29 days ago
Rust Rust
GNU General Public License v3.0 Or Slint Royalty-Free MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
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For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

slint

Posts with mentions or reviews of slint. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-05.

QMetaObject crate for Rust

Posts with mentions or reviews of QMetaObject crate for Rust. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-05.
  • 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Jan 2024
    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 like rust but want to use Qt.
    8 projects | /r/rust | 11 Dec 2023
    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
    8 projects | /r/rust | 11 Dec 2023
    You can use cxx-qt or qmetaobject-rs. Or use Slint
  • GUI development with Rust and GTK 4
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Apr 2023
  • Made my first app in Rust! A notification daemon for Linux :)
    9 projects | /r/rust | 29 Aug 2022
    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.
  • Using KConfig with Rust
    2 projects | dev.to | 14 Mar 2022
    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.
  • CXX-Qt: safe Rust bindings for Qt
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Mar 2022
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Mar 2022
    I wonder what problems from the list apply to another existing and more mature solution: https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs/
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Mar 2022
    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

  • Why does Rust code compile into a single executable binary?
    3 projects | /r/rust | 9 Feb 2022
    Whisperfish does this with Qt: https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs/issues/102

What are some alternatives?

When comparing slint and QMetaObject crate for Rust you can also consider the following projects:

tauri - Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web frontend.

iced - A cross-platform GUI library for Rust, inspired by Elm

egui - egui: an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI in Rust that runs on both web and native

lvgl - Embedded graphics library to create beautiful UIs for any MCU, MPU and display type.

dioxus - Fullstack GUI library for desktop, web, mobile, and more.

cxx-qt - Safe interop between Rust and Qt

webview - Tiny cross-platform webview library for C/C++. Uses WebKit (GTK/Cocoa) and Edge WebView2 (Windows).

druid - A data-first Rust-native UI design toolkit.

Slint - Slint is a toolkit to efficiently develop fluid graphical user interfaces for any display: embedded devices and desktop applications. We support multiple programming languages, such as Rust, C++ or JavaScript. [Moved to: https://github.com/slint-ui/slint]

fltk-rs - Rust bindings for the FLTK GUI library.

imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies

wxRust - A Rust binding of the wxWidgets cross platform toolkit.