vgtk VS relm

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/

There is Iced which is used by system76 in Pop!_OS, Druid [DISCONTINUED], GTK-rs, Relm, Azul and Tauri. Personally I would use Tauri for its speed using the OS's native web render, documentation of use with things such as Sveltekit and the ability to make UI's using JS, CSS and HTML. Tauri similarly to Electron whilst being far faster. But its up to personal preference really. There aren't any solid "go to" options at the moment.

Currently, I have narrowed potential libraries to: 1. Flutter 2. FLTK 3. Relm (GTK) 4. iced 5. Slint 6. Imgui, Imgui-rs 7. and gtk-rs

Relm (GTK)

Relm, Slint (formerly SixtyFPS), Druid and Iced are all very promising idiomatic GUI toolkits with a great deal of community activity around them, and all of those perform substantially better in the accessibility department than ImGui and egui, to my knowledge. areweguiyet.com can give you some more pointers as well.

To use relm, you need to add the gtk and relm libraries to your project's dependencies in your Cargo.toml file. You’ll also need to have the gtk library installed.

No , not really a lot of the time people are trying to tackle problems that have taken years to solve in other languages which isn’t easy and is why you see stuff abandoned. This project is also pretty similar to [relm](https://github.com/antoyo/relm) which is an active project.

The [older gtk3 version of relm](https://github.com/antoyo/relm) has 2.1k stars. Relm4 is uses gtk4 which is newer.

Relm (supposedly more idiomatic)