A declarative desktop UI framework for Rust built on GTK and GTK-rs

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  • vgtk

    A declarative desktop UI framework for Rust built on GTK and Gtk-rs

    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.

  • relm

    Idiomatic, GTK+-based, GUI library, inspired by Elm, written in Rust

    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.

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