windows-rs VS nodegui

It's a shame that, unlike with Win32, using WinUI places pretty harsh restrictions on which programming languages and environments you can use. Only C# and C++ are supported, the latter only with Microsoft compilers. For everything else, including Rust[1], Python and MinGW C/C++, there is no answer for OP's question, and the effect of this on the visual consistency of the Windows desktop is obvious - there is none. Every third-party app uses a different toolkit with a different look and feel, because the library providing the standard look and feel simply isn't available to the majority of developers.

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs/pull/1836

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs

On Windows you'd need to call the LoadLibraryEx method. You'd also need a crate to call Win32 functions, I suggest windows-rs.

windows-rs, Microsoft's crate wrapping the Windows API, already includes the WDK, the special sdk for creating kernel code.

On windows, I'll probably use https://github.com/gabdube/native-windows-gui or https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs both of them seem pretty solid.

*nod* It's an official Microsoft thing generated from official Microsoft API definition files. (The repo is at microsoft/windows-rs on GitHub.)

Microsoft offers official "bindings" to Win32 APIs through win32metadata. However, until recently, it did not include metadata for kernel-level functions or WDK. In early 2021, an issue was raised through windows-rs regarding this limitation, but progress was slow until now. Microsoft has finally released official metadata for WDK, which can be found on the wdkmetadata repository. The latest comment on the issue thread can be found here:

Is something wrong with https://github.com/deviceplug/btleplug or you haven't found it? You could also use bindings to platform libraries like https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs and https://github.com/rust-mobile/ndk if btleplug doesn't have something fundamental to you.

This looks like it hasn't been maintained in years but there's a modern equivalent in NodeGUI [1] which also has React/Svelte/Vue implementations. Unfortunately it requires a custom build of Node that merges the libuv and Qt6 event loops so YMMV.

It actually inspired me to write my own implementation with Svelte on top of QuickJS and Qt Widgets but the task of wrapping the entire Qt6 API in Rust proved to be intractable once I found out that most methods weren't marked Q_INVOKABLE and thus couldn't be called via reflection (requiring manual wrapping). Providing a `Document.createElement` API that created Qt Widgets with working attributes and event handling worked surprisingly well though!

[1] https://github.com/nodegui/nodegui

Hi, so this NodeGui library for building apps with native components is something I really want to get into, but, it does not work for me.. so I am starting this thread to check with yous (I depleted google results) if any one of you have tips or workarounds I can use. I wish to build a desktop app, but I really do not want to bundle a web browser for that purpose and NodeGui seems perfect.

Use NodeGui (or some equivalent tool) for this. Source: https://docs.nodegui.org/ This is needed because this entire project will run natively, by that I mean it will run with no browser, no local host and it no internet connection.

NodeGUI

Let's continue exploring Electron alternatives. This time, NodeGui. NodeGui uses Qt5 instead of Chromium, so we'll be leaving the familiar web development behind, but it tries to not be too far from it, as web development is what everyone knows.

(Disclaimer: My knowledge of Rust very limited, but I have quite a bit of experience with getting Qt/KDE classes to work with other languages.)

You are absolutely right. The effort to be acceptable bindings for Qt would be a tiny fraction of the cost compared to building a whole new Rust native GUI library.

Qt is huge set of libraries with an equally huge API. But there are a lot of shortcuts and smart ways of approaching the problem to get what you want out of Qt for minimum effort.

Bindings like PyQt and even PySide go for the nuclear option of generating bindings for the whole Qt API and trying to match the C++ API in style too. This is an absolutely massive huge task. Also, getting people to contribute to an open source bindings project is hard. Getting people to contribute to a bindings generator is even harder.

NodeGui https://github.com/nodegui/nodegui, Qt bindings for Nodejs, on the other hand takes a very different approach which in one way is low-tech but I think is actually very smart. I'll summerise the differences:

* It focuses on Qt Widgets first. This greatly reduces the amount of work to the parts that people actually need. (BTW, if you just want QML and Rust back-end then Jos van den Oever's work at https://invent.kde.org/sdk/rust-qt-binding-generator has probably got you covered already.)

There is actually a new GUI framework based out of Qt (a C++ GUI framework) that I have found recently : https://docs.nodegui.org/