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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

#51

Post by imbnwa »

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…

This must be why the two Rust GUIs I used daily, Neovide (Neovim) and Psst (Spotify) have stagnated as far as addressing visual bugs: they depended on Druid which, according to TFA, is abandonware

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#52

Post by fulafel »

vbezhenar wrote: post #7

I wonder if WebGPU could help with app GUI. I tried to understand how does it work but it seems it's all about triangles, so it's not really clear if it has any benefit over plain Canvas for standard UI approaches.

It would be interesting to get complete apps running there. Wasm-on-GPU seems a reasonable match since there's no OS APIs in Wasm.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#53

Post by imbnwa »

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 All it does it some button with outdated UI, few inputs nobody really uses and dropdown select suitable only for the most basic uses.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…

You forgot the part where the browser competently handles i18n and a11y, the later I especially wager none of these frameworks come close to

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#54

Post by klabb3 »

I am glad that there are people looking at GUI from the perspective of Rust. Many Rust idioms and patterns, like ownership and immutability, are very promising for GUI development.

However, this article also confirms an issue I have observed with the Rust ecosystem, which is fragmentation. It would have made me much more excited to see convergence behind one project than 15 different ones. I think Rust enthusiasts, bless their hearts, are often so excited about the puzzle of the language representations, that the output often ends up being more of a POC than a well-maintained library for users. It seems more-than-usual amount of projects are abandoned when the intellectually stimulating honeymoon phase is over. As a prospective user, this is probably fine for small leaf-dependencies, but it’s a major show-stopper for something like GUI.

I’ve never expressed it like this before, but I think there’s a moderately serious issue when a language seduces you away from the domain problem and towards the language itself, even if that is subjectively enjoyable. (In other languages like perhaps Java or C++, the language quirks are at least so dreadful that only masochists are spending more time than necessary on it)

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#55

Post by SnowProblem »

andyp-kw wrote: post #49
Liberonostrud wrote: post #41

What's wrong with TypeScript? Last time I checked all WASM stuff was slower and much heavier than TS/JS.

My understanding that WASM has a heavier load time, however actual benchmarks after the initial load are more impressive.

It’s not WASMs fault. Rust produces large binaries for whatever reason and people like to write their WASM in Rust. I’ve ported Rust to equivalent C and it was 25% of the size and similarly for loading times.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#56

Post by alpaca128 »

0000000000100 wrote: post #31
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…

> The learning curve for Rust is simply too high (my GOD the syntax)

The syntax isn't even close to being a difficult part of the language, and it's something you get used to very quickly. The Rust syntax just isn't readable for people who don't yet know Rust, just like I find C++ difficult to read.

> You can just get much more done, in less time with a web framework.

Sure, you can also get it running even quicker in Python. But when it comes to maintenance I prefer something where the type system wasn't just slapped on top. That said the web does feel like the only fully-featured and truly cross-platform GUI at the moment.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#57

Post by crispinb »

klabb3 wrote: post #54

I am glad that there are people looking at GUI from the perspective of Rust. Many Rust idioms and patterns, like ownership and immutability, are very promising for GUI development. However, this article also confirms an issue I have observed with the Rust ecosystem, which is fragmentation. It would have made me much more excited to see convergence behind one project than 15 different ones. I think Rust enthusiasts, b…

> an issue I have observed with the Rust ecosystem, which is fragmentation.

Absolutely. The fragmentation doesn't matter with all library types, because they don't all need the vast array of associated libraries, tools, common practices etc which mainstream GUI apps lean on.

Wide GUI framework/library adoption needs a head of steam (far more than it needs architectural elegance). Right now I don't foresee this happening with Rust. Not everything is foreseeable, of course.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#59

Post by low_tech_punk »

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 think Tauri bypassed the a11y challenge by delegating rendering to platform native web engines.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#60

Post by brabel »

chrismorgan wrote: post #20
Klonoar wrote: post #11

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". That's... entirely wrong and not necessary to paint swathes of developers like. Rust has numerous solutions for native GUIs. People ship apps with those stacks. Rust also has things like Tauri for when you don't want to deal with differences across platforms. Jus…

It’s not entirely wrong. Rust GUI has been held up by a significant dose of trying to do things properly , since the language definitely pushes you in that direction. It’s taken so long because Rust insists on correctness and on an ownership model that the popular solutions for GUIs simply didn’t fit into, so it’s taken time to come up with things that do work in those constraints.

Why do you guys think it's taking a lot of time because people are "trying to do it properly"?? See the comments about people trying the egui demo... that thing is as easy to crash as any junior dev React application.
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