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Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

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Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#21

Post by chrismorgan »

CJefferson wrote: post #6

Searched for “accessibility” — 0 results (I couldn’t see anything skimming down the page). Speaking as a Rust user, everyone in Rust land loves insulting Electron, but they have put some solid work into accessibility. In particular, using WASM to draw text with webgl or canvas, instead of DOM, may in the long term be one of the biggest steps back in accessibility ever.

Since people will bring up AccessKit, assuming it to be a potential panacea (… despite the obvious performance cost of doing absolutely everything twice):

The pure canvas approach used by things like egui (and it probably can’t change it) and current iced (it used to have iced_web which rendered to DOM, but that’s been abandoned for now for no obvious reason) is fundamentally and irredeemably unsuitable for general-purpose web content and apps, in ways that things like AccessKit cannot fix. I’ve written about this a few times; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33861831 is probably the best thread. The two items I like to focus on are links and scrolling, both of which are unavoidably broken.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#22

Post by josephg »

eslaught wrote: post #2

I've been building a profiler UI in egui recently, and have been pretty happy with it. I didn't try out all of the options in this article (there are rather a lot of them), but I did try several, and out of the ones I tried, egui was by far the highest performance. Since my goal is to shove as many rectangles onto the screen as possible, this was the killer feature for me, but it was also nice that it did most of the…

Cool demo, but by the looks of things the whole site is rendered into a canvas element. As a result, the browser's dev tools are useless, it won't work with screen readers, and you can't copy+paste text. And any text rendering and input elements will be non-native. (So, no nice iphone controls. No native / system configurable keyboard shortcuts. And so on.)

I sincerely hope the web as a whole doesn't move in this direction. The inspectibility of the DOM is one of the web's greatest strengths. Lets not throw that away.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#23

Post by klodolph »

KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #5
mcluck wrote: post #4

> GUI in Rust progresses with unprecedented speed – 3 months in Rust GUI-land is like 3 years in the mortal world. areweguiyet.rs was started almost exactly 5 years ago. That means it's been about 60 mortal years and we still don't have a definitive solution to GUIs.

That's because Rust GUI people are like Lispers and functional programmers — too obsessed with doing things correctly "from first principles" and "purity". For GUI programming, there is only one feature that matters: having a fuck ton of well supported widgets for every situation across every platform. Almost everything else is secondary. This is why HTML/CSS, Flutter (and to a lesser extent Qt) are so successful. No…

I think that you’re right, and broadly speaking, there’s an inverse correlation between how invested someone is in programming and how invested someone is in the problem domain. Could be Berkson’s paradox at play here, but I think that it’s really a question of opportunity cost—the time you spend becoming a better programmer is time you could have spent learning some problem domain that you could solve with programming.

So you end up with stuff like the image crate (a straight up disaster of a crate—lots of fancy Rust bells and whistles, doesn’t support a bunch of stuff you want to do with images, reading the GitHub bug reports make me feel no hope that the issues will be addressed, ever) and R (a straight up disaster of a language, just a nightmare to write, but full of useful statistics packages, always has the package you need, but the language was made by Satan).

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#24

Post by chrismorgan »

josephg wrote: post #22
eslaught wrote: post #2

I've been building a profiler UI in egui recently, and have been pretty happy with it. I didn't try out all of the options in this article (there are rather a lot of them), but I did try several, and out of the ones I tried, egui was by far the highest performance. Since my goal is to shove as many rectangles onto the screen as possible, this was the killer feature for me, but it was also nice that it did most of the…

Cool demo, but by the looks of things the whole site is rendered into a canvas element. As a result, the browser's dev tools are useless, it won't work with screen readers, and you can't copy+paste text. And any text rendering and input elements will be non-native. (So, no nice iphone controls. No native / system configurable keyboard shortcuts. And so on.) I sincerely hope the web as a whole doesn't move in this dir…

And scrolling is unavoidably all wrong: dragging two fingers from one end of my touchpad to the other should scroll by about four screenfuls, but only manages two thirds of one screenful; a quick swipe should send it dozens of screenfuls, with inertia, but manages even less than that two thirds of a screenful; and these limitations are fundamental due to the web not possessing the right primitives. (Then there are more fixable bugs like that, after focusing the page, you have to move the mouse before scrolling will work.)

And input element behaviour is non-native, which will never be properly fixable since different UAs have different behaviours, some of which cannot be emulated even if you sniff which platform you’re on (e.g. scroll bar grab and drag behaviour when you move far outside the window). (Then there are also simple bugs: holding Left or Right while the range element is focused only bumps the value once, not according to key repeat. And Up and Down don’t work.)

I have written about these things a number of times, fundamental limitations of the pure-canvas approach that make it unavoidably and permanently unsuitable. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33861831 is probably the best thread.

(And just for a bit of fun: the demo can have slightly negative utilisation, drawing outside the box!)

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#25

Post by echelon »

eslaught wrote: post #2

I've been building a profiler UI in egui recently, and have been pretty happy with it. I didn't try out all of the options in this article (there are rather a lot of them), but I did try several, and out of the ones I tried, egui was by far the highest performance. Since my goal is to shove as many rectangles onto the screen as possible, this was the killer feature for me, but it was also nice that it did most of the…

Obligatory jaw-dropping egui demo:

https://www.egui.rs/#demo

Egui slaps and is clearly going places.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#26

Post by winstonewert »

TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #17

This may not be the message of the article but as a side-rant: I really don't understand the use-case for a Rust-based GUI. Rust's syntax, manual memory management, and compile times makes it seem like it's really not meant for this kind of workload, but instead for things like compilers, embedded systems, that kind of thing. I understand that not every UI needs to be a cross-platform blah blah blah written in TypeJa…

From a Rustacean's perspective: Golang is a no go because it lacks enum types, sensible error handling, generics (I think it has some version of this now), non-nullable types, or macros. Once you've gotten used to using these kinds of features in Rust, it is really annoying to go back and work in a language that lacks them. Basically, golang takes such an opposite design approach to Rust, that if you like Rust you'll probably hate golang.

We also find that once you get used to the borrow checker, we mostly don't miss garbage collection. And garbage collection isn't a panacea either, as almost any large project still ends up with memory leaks caused by stray references.

So, basically, we like Rust and think its a well designed language. It is quite frankly better, as a language, than any of the alternatives that we could be writing in. As such, it'd be nice if we could develop GUI applications in it.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#27

Post by serial_dev »

LatticeAnimal wrote: post #3

That is unfortunate that Druid was discontinued. I really enjoyed working with it a few months ago.

Im a Flutter developer, and, though I love Dart, it's still only my second favorite language, so I can't wait for a viable "flutter alternative to emerge in the Rust ecosystem.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#28

Post by stakhanov »

vbezhenar wrote: post #9
KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because Rust GUI people are like Lispers and functional programmers — too obsessed with doing things correctly "from first principles" and "purity". For GUI programming, there is only one feature that matters: having a fuck ton of well supported widgets for every situation across every platform. Almost everything else is secondary. This is why HTML/CSS, Flutter (and to a lesser extent Qt) are so successful. No…

I'd argue that the most successful UI platform is a browser. And guess what? Browser does not have a fuck ton of well supported widgets. All it does it some button with outdated UI, few inputs nobody really uses and dropdown select suitable only for the most basic uses. Anything other built on divs with CSS and JS. And it works. So my opinion is that it's definitely solid foundations what matters. Rest will come with…

> Browser does not have a fuck ton of well supported widgets [...] And it works.

I beg to differ. When the economics of doing UIs shifted away from APIs like Windows Forms, Carbon, JavaFX towards the current trend of doing everything in a browser, it brought with it some serious regression in how powerful and user friendly those GUIs are.

With Microsoft-level resources, you can take on a mammoth engineering task like implementing Office or Visual Studio in the browser. But if you are resource-constrained in the way that most developers are, you cut corners and drop functionality, and that's where we are today with browser GUIs ...not that any of that matters if all you're doing is CRUD, like most people are. But one shouldn't judge technology by its easiest, most boring, and degenerate use cases.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#29

Post by CJefferson »

capableweb wrote: post #8
CJefferson wrote: post #6

Searched for “accessibility” — 0 results (I couldn’t see anything skimming down the page). Speaking as a Rust user, everyone in Rust land loves insulting Electron, but they have put some solid work into accessibility. In particular, using WASM to draw text with webgl or canvas, instead of DOM, may in the long term be one of the biggest steps back in accessibility ever.

I'm not familiar with the entire ecosystem but at least egui offers accessibility via AccessKit

Thanks. Last time I looked in depth (about 6 months ago), nothing supported accessibility, but you are right, it looks like egui at least has made excellent progress.

I still keep my comment about the article -- I feel discussions of GUIs should talk about this type of thing, as so many people require accessibility support.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#30

Post by crispinb »

I doubt Rust is going to become used for (the GUI layer of) GUI apps far outside of Rust enthusiast circles. To build a widely attractive ecosystem it needs a dominant framework to which enough of the many widget and theming and distribution libraries and tools necessary for broad adoption attach. Rust's culture in this respect is far more Clojure (bolt together your own from a thousand options) than Elixir (just use Phoenix).

I have no doubt Rust will be used as part of many GUI apps via Tauri and others. 1Password shows how successful it can be as the real core of an app that has a separate web-tech GUI layer.

There's enough energy in the Rust ecosystem that I'm sure niche adoption will continue. But all-Rust apps beyond HN/Github-browsing/System76 circles? My guess is it's unlikely.

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