vgtk VS flo_draw

A pretty fun Rust GUI experienc is vgtk[0], which is doing a bunch of macro magic to give a "we're coding in React" vibe to GTK+. I don't really have a specific thing I want to code in a native GUI at the moment but if I did I think this would be the most tempting for me.

[0]: https://github.com/bodil/vgtk/

a stateful GUI markup language is react. it is not yet the case that react-like code works for desktop, though there are cool examples like vgtk https://github.com/bodil/vgtk

from what i gather from https://github.com/bodil/vgtk/issues/78, you're better off using realm

I'm always curious to see these projects, because I've been experimenting with a React renderer for the GJS bindings for a while. It's frustrating because GTK "feels like" it's so close to being able to support a vdom/declarative paradigm, but the devil is in the details.

The simple use-cases like "Window > Box > Label" are easy to get going. The more complex widgets like Stack/Grid/TreeView ... aren't.

This project seems to have the same issue: https://github.com/bodil/vgtk/issues/40

This is made more difficult now GTK4 has removed the Container base class, so there's no longer a unified interface for adding children (although it had caveats in the first place).

I totally get the GTK view that (presumably) specific widgets are more intuitive with specific add/remove APIs (like the grid - one doesn't really "appendChild" to a grid).

It just feels like: if there was a consistent container API comparable to the web's appendChild approach, a vdom/declarative approach would require only a very light wrapper. Without it, I keep coming back to the idea of implementing wrapper widgets that expose that consistent API instead. And that's just not something I want to maintain - effectively duplicating each GTK widget for the purpose of making it fit into a tree model.

It's also a problem of trying to wrap richer functionality (pack_start and pack_end) into a simpler set (append only) of course.

So I don't know exactly what my point is :) Perhaps cautioning the reader that the simplicity of the approach comes with a catch.

A declarative desktop UI framework for Rust built on GTK and GTK-rs\ (23 comments)

Build your own To-do List Application in Rust: https://bodil.lol/vgtk/

I've been working a 2D rendering toolkit that increasingly looks to me like it probably deserves a mention on these lists: https://github.com/logicalshift/flo_draw (but I'm not on Reddit...). Layers, vector sprites, dynamic textures and a streaming API that fits well with 'reactive' designs are amongst the features that make it stand out from what else is out there. It's super simple to get going too.

Started life as a rendering layer for FlowBetween so I could put in whatever looked like it was 'winning' later on but wound up writing my own renderer as there wasn't anything quite there yet. Still has that design so another unique thing is that it's possible to use the same API with whatever rendering layer you want.

Speaking of FlowBetween, one thing I have wanted to do for ages is to get rid of the platform-specific GUIs and use something universal. It should be easy because FlowBetween sends straightforward instructions to an independent GUI layer, but I keep bouncing off for a few reasons:

- it's a big ole task so I definitely want to pick something that's stable and also lets me hedge my bets in terms of being easy to migrate away from

If Rust's your language, I wrote a library that should be pretty good at 2D things: https://github.com/logicalshift/flo_draw - I wrote it while working on another project (FlowBetween) where I found debugging would be easier if I could just render something on-screen but rendering stuff on screen always required a ridiculous amount of setup.

It has some nice options for feeding its own output back into itself as it uses streams rather than callbacks so it's quite good for procedural rendering type tasks (the 'Wibble' example is a good place to start with that)

I've been working on one for a while now that's very slowly coming together: https://github.com/logicalshift/flowbetween if you're interested.

I've been building out some backend stuff lately so there's a bunch of new features waiting to go in. https://github.com/Logicalshift/flo_draw has some demonstrations of the sort of procedural animation features I'm planning on adding, for instance.