Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

monadical.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 272 posts

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#31

Post by 0000000000100 »

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…

Yeah it seems to be a pretty niche use case. The learning curve for Rust is simply too high (my GOD the syntax). You can just get much more done, in less time with a web framework.

I looked into Rust for writing games (including the UI frameworks), but found that the power it provides isn't really worth all the mental overhead. Most games don't really need that much power, particularly if you are using non-realistic graphics. In the event that you do actually need extra optimization, most engines let you hook down into C++ for raw performance.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#32

Post by 8note »

winstonewert wrote: post #26
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…

If you're going to use electron and all the bad that comes with it, why not just use typescript though?

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#33

Post by tristanMatthias »

echelon wrote: post #25
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.

Got this to crash by change the font size in the font book demo.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#34

Post by croes »

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…

The browser is more equivalent to the .Net framework and the JVM.

The GUI part was started by bootstrap and similar tools and shifted to React, Vue etc.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#35

Post by crispinb »

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…

> I really don't understand the use-case for a Rust-based GUI.

For people already writing things (libraries, cli's etc) in Rust who want to add a GUI while staying with the language. No great mystery.

As for a business case, aside from individual developer taste/preference, it's hard to see that there is one outside of niches. System76 found a case for it with their DE. I think there might be a strong case for lightweight Rust GUI frameworks like egui for embedded device displays.

But for mainstream web / desktop / mobile apps? I can't at the moment see what the point would be.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#36

Post by Animats »

echelon wrote: post #25
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.

"Loading..."

I've run it before. I know what it looks like.

I use egui. It's OK. But you have to code up all your dialog boxes in Rust. This is misery if you have fifty dialog boxes and widgets you need. The widget library is weak and the themes are poor. I don't care, because I'm doing a metaverse client, and all the visuals are in the 3D image. The 2D GUI on top is minimal, as is normal for games. So minimal that it disappears completely, like YouTube controls, when you're not using it, to give you a clean 3D world.

(Egui hint: don't use bottom-up layout. Always work top-down, left to right. Egui layout is one pass, and while it tries to look ahead, it's not good at it.)

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#37

Post by potamic »

echelon wrote: post #25
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.

It's pretty lagging for me on a beefy machine with hardware acceleration enabled. What gives?

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#38

Post by weinzierl »

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…

Maybe you are right but it sounds a bit like: "For GUI design there is only one feature that matters: having a fuck ton of well supported colors for every situation across every platform." Replace colors with fonts or animated GIFs and you and up in late 90s web design.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#39

Post by eslaught »

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…

I have no beef with deferred mode GUIs except that I have yet to see one with the performance characteristics I need.

For what it's worth, egui does have an accessibility layer. I haven't gone to any particular effort to wire it up yet (besides what you get by default): https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/167

Post reply on HN