Show HN: Rust GUI Library via Flutter

Hi, I made a bridge (https://github.com/fzyzcjy/flutter_rust_bridge v2.0.0) between Flutter and Rust, which auto translates syntaxes like arbitrary types, &mut, async, traits, results, closure (callback), lifetimes, etc. The goal is to make a bridge between the two, seamlessly as if working in one single language.

Then, as an example, I showed how to write Rust applications with GUI by utilizing Flutter. That is discussed in the link in details.

To play with it, please visit the GitHub repo, or refer to the end of the article for detailed folders and commands.

When I first released 1.0.0 years ago, it only contained few features compared to today. It is the result of the hard work of contributors and me, and many thanks to all the contributors!

Show HN: Rust GUI Library via Flutter
cjycode.com

Interesting! IIUC this is done using source-to-source translation? It is a bit hard to understand from the docs what technical approach is. The docs are clearly aimed at users and I find them impressive, well done. I'd be interested in knowing the approach and how it compares to wasm based Rust web frameworks before diving more deeply into it.

One advantage of combining Rust with Flutter seems to be that Flutter is a whole framework already and one would be able to share code and data structures between server and client side.

A comparison with other ways Rust

I have been using this to build an app[0] for the last couple of years and I want to say that it has been a pleasure to use, there are some wrinkles but overall I have been very happy with the experience.

Upgrading from v1 to v2 was not too difficult and v2 is a significant upgrade with lots of useful features, massively improved codegen experience and support for tokio async were the big gamechangers for me.

Writing all the app business logic in Rust and using Dart as the front-end works out really well. I know Flutter/Dart doesn't get much love here on HN but in my opinion I think it's much easier to reason about than a system like React which I think is the wrong level of abstraction compared to Flutter's render the entire widget tree approach.

Massive thanks to @fzyzcjy for all the work on FRB, great job!

[0]: https://saveoursecrets.com

Well done! I've heard only good things about rust_flutter_bridge. Some questions though (more like flutter question), how bloated flutter is (i.e. final app size) compared to mobile native (Java, Swift?) for simple app? And how's the UI performance looks like?

Tauri supports mobile platforms too. Sadly, it's not a first class citizen in Tauri 2.0 as promised.

I tried both Flutter and Tauri. IMHO: Tauri is better, because it allows me to use existing web frameworks (or even plain Markdown + Pandoc!), to make web-pages, while handling business logic in type safe Rust.