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Show HN: Slint – A declarative UI toolkit for embedded and desktop

slint.dev

51–60 of 152 posts

Re: Show HN: Slint – A declarative UI toolkit for embedded and desktop

#51

I just spent the last two weeks choosing an embedded ui framework and then building out a little demo to test out its capabilities. I settled on Slint and have been very impressed with the design of the domain specific language they came up with. It’s small, simple, powerful and easy to learn IMO. The vs code extension for real time gui feedback is amazing. I’ve used swift ui before and Slint is as much of a joy to u…

I assume you're already doing this since you're on a microcontroller, but have you set

  [profile.release]
  codegen-units = 1
  lto = true

Re: Show HN: Slint – A declarative UI toolkit for embedded and desktop

#52
post #50

There is often a criticism of Javascript, that new frameworks seem to appear every week. But it honestly feels like every week on HN there is a new Rust UI project showing up. Whether it is some new HTML/web thing, a native app thing, a TUI thing, etc. Don't get me wrong, I think that is the sign of a very healthy ecosystem. I am just curious how the Rust evangelists will spin this. Somehow this constant churn on the…

It's a somewhat hot area of development and there isn't a clear winner yet, so of course there are new projects all the time.

Re: Show HN: Slint – A declarative UI toolkit for embedded and desktop

#53
This looks really neat, I played with it a bit and the DSL is well thought out.

One thing I can't figure though: how do we set default values for internal Struct?

Said default values are mentionned in the documentation (here: https://slint.dev/releases/1.0.2/docs/slint/src/reference/ty...>).

  // ok even if a is missing, it will just have the default value

Re: Show HN: Slint – A declarative UI toolkit for embedded and desktop

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is a 'user'? Literally one device running the application? In that case the pricing does seem a bit steep in a small business context.

A user is a person (eg. a developer or a designer etc.) using Slint to build the GUI.

Ahh, it makes this much more reasonable.

The enterprise pricing made me thought at first that the cost is per application user. (Making enterprise lisence more appealing) … of course per end-user pricing would be way too expensive.

Re: Show HN: Slint – A declarative UI toolkit for embedded and desktop

#56
post #50

There is often a criticism of Javascript, that new frameworks seem to appear every week. But it honestly feels like every week on HN there is a new Rust UI project showing up. Whether it is some new HTML/web thing, a native app thing, a TUI thing, etc. Don't get me wrong, I think that is the sign of a very healthy ecosystem. I am just curious how the Rust evangelists will spin this. Somehow this constant churn on the…

> Somehow this constant churn on the Javascript side is worthy of snide, satire and ridicule.

In my experience it is frontend devs, not backend devs, who are most harsh on Javascript's procession of UI frameworks. Rust users are more than happy to take inspiration from Javascript UI frameworks, if for no other reason than the reactive/declarative approach is a better fit for Rust than the prevailing inheritance-heavy/object-oriented approach of Qt and GTK.

Re: Show HN: Slint – A declarative UI toolkit for embedded and desktop

#58
post #42

The comparison sections are very confusing. It says you will compare your UI toolkit with, for example, Flutter and then there is no comparison there at all. I thought the site is broken on mobile, I tried different browsers, etc, because the comparison was just not there. If you don't have any real content there because you don't want to start a flame war, you could try something like what the Flutter team did, they…

This is what I do: - Write the backend in Rust - Write the UI in Flutter - Tie them together using gRPC. You get an API and ability to run client and server on different machines as well I looked at the flutter to rust bridge and started to play with it, but assuming your UI can withstand the slight overhead of gRPC I found it a simpler way to proceed (although I'm not that far in yet)

> You get an API and ability to run client and server on different machines as well

So like a web app.

Re: Show HN: Slint – A declarative UI toolkit for embedded and desktop

#59
post #50

There is often a criticism of Javascript, that new frameworks seem to appear every week. But it honestly feels like every week on HN there is a new Rust UI project showing up. Whether it is some new HTML/web thing, a native app thing, a TUI thing, etc. Don't get me wrong, I think that is the sign of a very healthy ecosystem. I am just curious how the Rust evangelists will spin this. Somehow this constant churn on the…

it’s a different situation though: very few people have shipped guis in Rust, so the Rust projects are largely greenfield, while a lot of JavaScript front ends are legacy apps.

Re: Show HN: Slint – A declarative UI toolkit for embedded and desktop

#60
post #50

There is often a criticism of Javascript, that new frameworks seem to appear every week. But it honestly feels like every week on HN there is a new Rust UI project showing up. Whether it is some new HTML/web thing, a native app thing, a TUI thing, etc. Don't get me wrong, I think that is the sign of a very healthy ecosystem. I am just curious how the Rust evangelists will spin this. Somehow this constant churn on the…

All of these rust libraries and frameworks are in their infancy and there are no clear winners yet. Its probably less of a sign of a healthy ecosystem, and more of a sign of an immature ecosystem. There are a few projects that seem promising, but all of that could be invalidated by next week.

Meanwhile in the js ecosystem things are both incredibly stable and also in flux. All of the usual suspects are still around, but competing in ways intergrate both server and client rendering as seamlessly as possible. There is also some movement around introducing optimising compilers - see solid and svelte.

But its probably safe to say, ignoring the tooling churn going on with Rust, Go, and Zig seemingly systematically replacing all js tooling like for like, things are pretty stable when it comes to js ui libraries.

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