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Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs

raphlinus.github.io

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Re: Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs

#101

Post by armchairhacker »

jollybean wrote: post #96
armchairhacker wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the solution for this is to have a shared context, batch changes and then run through all of them at once. So when you e.g. mutate a variable, it doesn’t actually change until the next frame. which you can get by calling some sort of poll function. The poll function has mutable access to your entire widget tree, applies the updates, then you can have more UI with shared access Rust is fast enough that i thi…

Most UI frameworks enforce a 'single thread' rule, i.e. one thread at a time touches the tree. Would this solve the problem?

yes there’s absolutely no need for UI to be multi-threaded. You can do stuff in the background but IMO multi-threaded UI is completely useless.

You have an event loop where you poll for input => propagate changes => commit changes => rerender UI. Normally you might have poll => propagate => rerender, but when you delay the changes you can represent everything in a shared reference, and when commit them you have a single source which takes the 1 mutable reference Rust allows.

Re: Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs

#102

Post by Const-me »

stefan_ wrote: post #97
Const-me wrote: post #91

On Windows, the graphics story is more or less OK. The OS includes Direct2D and DirectWrite user-facing APIs. It’s now possible to implement an equivalent on all modern platforms which have a 3D GPU. An open-source example in C# https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac#vector-graphics-engine That particular one requires GLES 3.1, but I’m sure (did it before) it’s also possible to implement comparable stuff on top of GLES2.…

Huh? That library exists, it is called Skia, it is the most premier 2D GPU (among other targets) rendering library in the world and it powers the Android UI, Chrome, Firefox and a ton of other things. See also: https://skia.org/

Skia is not GPU first. It was initially designed for CPU-only rendering, 3D GPU support was an afterthought. For that reason, the quality of that support ain’t great. AFAIK it only uses 3D GPU to compose layers.

Re: Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs

#103

Post by baby »

CrimsonVoid wrote: post #40

I know this is going to be a controversial opinion considering how much everyone seems to love Rust, but does anyone else find Rust incredibly painful to work with, even for simple tasks? Like I'm no stranger to unmanaged languages, and to some extent I cut my teeth on C, but doing anything with Rust always feels like the most aggravating exercise in needless verbosity and the "Lombok problem" doesn't help either. (F…

I really really hate Java, in parts due to the verbosity, and find Rust very pleasant to write. I'm not sure I would call Rust verbose at all, although you can look at code that gets verbose due to the expressiveness of the language and the desire for people to over engineer things (versus a language like Golang that remains very readable at all time). But when I write my own code, I tend to avoid the complexity and write pretty clear (I would like to think) Rust code.

There's definitely a learning curve (I think everyone agrees with that one), which might be what you're feeling now, but that quickly goes away once you pick up some speed. I would say keep on learning Rust and the language will grow on you.

Re: Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs

#104

Post by baby »

filleokus wrote: post #50
CrimsonVoid wrote: post #40

I know this is going to be a controversial opinion considering how much everyone seems to love Rust, but does anyone else find Rust incredibly painful to work with, even for simple tasks? Like I'm no stranger to unmanaged languages, and to some extent I cut my teeth on C, but doing anything with Rust always feels like the most aggravating exercise in needless verbosity and the "Lombok problem" doesn't help either. (F…

I remember reading (on HN I think) that coding in Rust is like playing some kind of intricate puzzle game. Tricking the compiler into accepting your code. You feel smart when it works and challenged when it complains. I personally like that aspect, at least for now. On the other end of the spectrum I would say Go is, with its lack of "advanced" or functional language features and sans-syntactic-sugar straight forward…

Completely agree with Golang, it is such a nice language as it remains pretty basic/simple and thus extremely readable and easy to use. Sure it's not expressive enough for some applications, but for a lot of applications it really shines. I'm mostly doing Rust nowadays, but if I want to use a beautiful and enjoyable garbage collected language there's Golang.

Re: Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs

#105

Post by aaaaaaaaaaab »

raphlinus wrote: post #85
aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by “pushing incremental reactivity all the way from app logic to GPU (as opposed to needlessly redoing work)”?

From a computation perspective, UI is fundamentally an incremental computation engine. Most elements are not changing from frame to frame, so you can either recompute and re-render, or be smarter about only propagating deltas. I'd like to propagate those deltas all the way to the GPU, so you reuse lots of things from the previous frame if they haven't been invalidated. I'll be writing about this in considerably more…

Wait, are you talking about deltas as in damage rects?

Re: Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs

#107

Post by OJFord »

This seems to implicitly mean low-level GUIs, or GUI frameworks? The only mention of Tauri is 'tao the fork of winit used by'.

The article opens:

> A few times a week, someone asks on the #gui-and-ui channel on the Rust Discord, “what is the best UI toolkit for my application?” Unfortunately there is still no clear answer to this question.

I would say if by 'UI toolkit for my application' you just want a way to make a GUI app, not a game or some kind of highly native or specific interaction needs thing, just use Tauri. No idea why it's not a 'top contender', it has an order of magnitude more GH stars than Druid, for whatever that counts; I can only assume they mean lower-level toolkits. (No affiliation.)

I just think someone new or unexposed to rust's going to see this and think it's way harder than it needs to be or is just to do something basic.

Re: Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs

#108

Post by lakecresva »

CrimsonVoid wrote: post #40

I know this is going to be a controversial opinion considering how much everyone seems to love Rust, but does anyone else find Rust incredibly painful to work with, even for simple tasks? Like I'm no stranger to unmanaged languages, and to some extent I cut my teeth on C, but doing anything with Rust always feels like the most aggravating exercise in needless verbosity and the "Lombok problem" doesn't help either. (F…

> but even seven(!) years later it still feels like a pre-alpha language.

Can you give any concrete examples of things that give you this impression?

Re: Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs

#109

Post by nu11ptr »

CrimsonVoid wrote: post #40

I know this is going to be a controversial opinion considering how much everyone seems to love Rust, but does anyone else find Rust incredibly painful to work with, even for simple tasks? Like I'm no stranger to unmanaged languages, and to some extent I cut my teeth on C, but doing anything with Rust always feels like the most aggravating exercise in needless verbosity and the "Lombok problem" doesn't help either. (F…

To be honest, usually the exact opposite. There are some things where I start writing in Rust and it turns out to be a bit of a pain, but this is unusual for the types of stuff I write. Typically this just means I need a crate to do the heavy lifting as I'm trying to do too much. I would say most things are solidly better and easier to write, and given the safety guarantees, often work even without tests (exception being complicated algorithms that I usually get wrong the first time). In summary, yes, I'm a bit of a fanboy, but there is a reason I am - Rust is pragmatic and helps me get things done in a way I have not found in other languages.

Re: Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs

#110

Post by shrimp_emoji »

CrimsonVoid wrote: post #40

I know this is going to be a controversial opinion considering how much everyone seems to love Rust, but does anyone else find Rust incredibly painful to work with, even for simple tasks? Like I'm no stranger to unmanaged languages, and to some extent I cut my teeth on C, but doing anything with Rust always feels like the most aggravating exercise in needless verbosity and the "Lombok problem" doesn't help either. (F…

It was painful for me at first. Many struggles with the borrow checker. I dropped it for a year or two and came back, and, weirdly, my return met smooth sailing -- the borrow checker and I were a well-oiled cybernetic machine. It was like the lessons of my first time burrowed into my subconscious or something.

At this point, I kind of feel like, if you're writing safe C or C++, being mindful of where the data goes and why, you're pretty much writing Rust that compiles.

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