GUI development with Rust and GTK 4

AFAIK, for better or worse, this is the only UI crate (other than HTML-like UI using something like Tauri) that provides a full set of widgets/capabilities on Rust. Every other UI lib is incomplete in some way or falls short for anything other than a toy or specialty type app in my experience.

UPDATE: Things I have my eye on as they mature: Slint, egui, and iced. I'm especially watching iced as Pop_os is using it for their DE and likely will add quite a few widgets.

Re: GUI development with Rust and GTK 4

#5

Post by pshirshov » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 12:42 PM UTC

tcper wrote: post #2

First time known GTK supports CSS.

Oh, they even had support for hotkey customization with css rules but, unfortunately, got that removed too.

Re: GUI development with Rust and GTK 4

#6

Post by kramerger » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 12:46 PM UTC

What are the disadvantages of using 'static here?

I wonder if a garbage collected language would have a more accurate life time for that object

Re: GUI development with Rust and GTK 4

#7

Post by DoctorOW » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 12:54 PM UTC

nu11ptr wrote: post #4

AFAIK, for better or worse, this is the only UI crate (other than HTML-like UI using something like Tauri) that provides a full set of widgets/capabilities on Rust. Every other UI lib is incomplete in some way or falls short for anything other than a toy or specialty type app in my experience. UPDATE: Things I have my eye on as they mature: Slint, egui, and iced. I'm especially watching iced as Pop_os is using it for…

There are plenty of situations where GTK might be better than Slint, but not so overwhelmingly that I'd call it only for toy apps.

Re: GUI development with Rust and GTK 4

#8

Post by CyberDildonics » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 12:56 PM UTC

kramerger wrote: post #6

What are the disadvantages of using 'static here? I wonder if a garbage collected language would have a more accurate life time for that object

You wonder based on what? Static will put something in the binary itself and it will be memory mapped in, which won't even need to be directly allocated.

Re: GUI development with Rust and GTK 4

#9

Post by jph » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 12:57 PM UTC

Rust GTK4 "hello world" app, as a downloadable project, demonstrating the builder pattern:

https://github.com/SixArm/rust-guideposts/blob/main/projects...

Re: GUI development with Rust and GTK 4

#10

Post by nu11ptr » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 12:58 PM UTC

DoctorOW wrote: post #7

nu11ptr wrote: post #4

AFAIK, for better or worse, this is the only UI crate (other than HTML-like UI using something like Tauri) that provides a full set of widgets/capabilities on Rust. Every other UI lib is incomplete in some way or falls short for anything other than a toy or specialty type app in my experience. UPDATE: Things I have my eye on as they mature: Slint, egui, and iced. I'm especially watching iced as Pop_os is using it for…

There are plenty of situations where GTK might be better than Slint, but not so overwhelmingly that I'd call it only for toy apps.

While you can create one on your own, any lib that doesn't have a tree widget isn't ready for primetime IMO. Obviously others may have a different opinion. Also, I don't believe there is any way to embed a webview at this point which is often necessary to embed things like charts or other widgets you don't want to create on your own.