Why is building a UI in Rust so hard?

• yew

  200 29,888 8.6 MDX

  Rust / Wasm framework for creating reliable and efficient web applications

  

I disagree with the premise. Building a UI in Rust is fairly straightforward! Just look at Yew, Dioxus, or Slint and how they manage interfaces. I believe the core of the issue at hand is the same of mass adoption of Rust: people have to learn a new way of doing things, and that makes it somewhat scary to approach.

• slint

  138 14,929 9.9 Rust

  Slint is a declarative GUI toolkit to build native user interfaces for Rust, C++, or JavaScript apps.

  

I disagree with the premise. Building a UI in Rust is fairly straightforward! Just look at Yew, Dioxus, or Slint and how they manage interfaces. I believe the core of the issue at hand is the same of mass adoption of Rust: people have to learn a new way of doing things, and that makes it somewhat scary to approach.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• dioxus

  155 18,291 9.9 Rust

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

  

I disagree with the premise. Building a UI in Rust is fairly straightforward! Just look at Yew, Dioxus, or Slint and how they manage interfaces. I believe the core of the issue at hand is the same of mass adoption of Rust: people have to learn a new way of doing things, and that makes it somewhat scary to approach.

• winsafe

  41 437 9.4 Rust

  Windows API and GUI in safe, idiomatic Rust.

WinSafe says hello.

• PacMan

  1 28 10.0 Clojure

  Pac-Man demo in Clojure (by pac1979)

And one can go and write pacman in the same way. It is basically the "functional core, imperative shell" pattern of arranging things: The UI is the shell and the computation the core.

• egui

  203 19,596 9.7 Rust

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

I have tried to use both https://docs.rs/fltk/latest/fltk/ and https://github.com/emilk/egui for my small tool https://github.com/PhilipK/BoilR .

• BoilR

  149 1,309 6.4 Rust

  Synchronize games from other platforms into your Steam library (by PhilipK)

I have tried to use both https://docs.rs/fltk/latest/fltk/ and https://github.com/emilk/egui for my small tool https://github.com/PhilipK/BoilR .

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• taffy

  36 1,794 8.6 Rust

  A high performance rust-powered UI layout library

  

Rust actually has a library for this (Taffy - https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy). I know, because I implemented the CSS Grid support. It was a challenge, but everybody should be able to reuse that now.

• Qt

  26 2,273 10.0 C++

  Qt Base (Core, Gui, Widgets, Network, ...)

  

For e.g. if you’re writing a framework, you need to interface with Cocoa on MacOS to draw windows, which only provides an Objective C or Swift interface. You can look at the Qt source code and see how they do it: https://github.com/qt/qtbase/tree/067b53864112c084587fa9a507eb4bde3d50a6e1/src/plugins/platforms/cocoa

• EasyGUI

  1 6 10.0 APL

  Utility library for creating pages on the Chromium Embedded Framework using HTMLRenderer (by JoshDavid)

GUI in APL in the wild

• rust-cef

  1 39 10.0 Rust

  Discontinued Bindings to the Chromium Embedded Framework for Rust

The great thing is that this also solves rust problem: just use CEF. Why didn’t the author thought about this?

• iced

  165 22,704 9.9 Rust

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

  

Glow support is planned to be removed https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/pull/1697 . Probably a good call.

• gecko-dev

  78 3,105 10.0

  Read-only Git mirror of the Mercurial gecko repositories at https://hg.mozilla.org. How to contribute: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contribution_quickref.html

  

I checked Firefox monorepo, it has over 4x more C++ than Rust.

Suggest a related project