windows-rs VS Slint

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.

As an anecdote, the three top contributors to sixtyfps are ex-Qt people. I think it is not anecdotal that there is at least some degree of overlap and competition between Rust and C++, and that this is a market that surely The Qt Company is watching.

SixtyFPS (https://sixtyfps.io/) is in progress for Rust, but it is still early days. It also does not technically use a native toolkit (it uses Qt), but I believe that might be on roadmap. For traditional GUI apps, I think the lack of a table or tree widget is the most limiting for the time being. They have stated they intend to remedy that.

The most promising GUI hasn't been posted here, SixtyFPS. It's in it's early stages and not FOSS, but it's built by some ex-QT cats and has a lot of potential.

People have been recommending https://sixtyfps.io/ to me.

There is already a project to make a Qt like GUI toolkit in Rust: https://sixtyfps.io/ It is really similar to Qt https://sixtyfps.io/releases/0.1.5/docs/rust/sixtyfps/index.html

People are doing that too. https://sixtyfps.io/ is basically a Qt clone in Rust, actually developed by previous Qt developers.

spdlog, a pretty useful and more and more commonly used logging library for C++.\ SixtyFPS, an emerging GUI library for Rust, but you can use it in multiple languages. It uses OpenGL or Qt currently as backend (well, it's a new library and they wanted two from the get-go to make sure their abstractions are done right/well enough). They started a company this year for it too.

Just so some are not aware, there's a new project called sixtyfps by some people who were in the Qt world for long. I didn't take a deep dive into it but it looks promising.