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Rust cross-platform GPUI components

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Re: Rust cross-platform GPUI components

#21

Post by brainless »

This looks very good from the screenshots. I will try this as quickly as I can. I have been building with egui and have tried Iced, Slint and Makepad.

I built (agentic coded) a stocks viewer app for Indian stock market data: https://github.com/brainless/Indistocks. It was a fantastic experience as to how easily I could build a GUI app.

My main product also uses egui: https://github.com/brainless/nocodo. It used to have a web app frontend and I moved to desktop app after the experiment with Indistocks. The experience has been really good, also coded with agents.

Desktop apps are fun and even on my somewhat old and slow laptop (i5 8th gen, 16 GB RAM, 2GB nvidia dedicated graphics), they are so much faster than web apps on Chrome (on Linux). I want desktop apps to make a big comeback, we could use so many old devices.

Re: Rust cross-platform GPUI components

#22

Post by nu11ptr »

wongarsu wrote: post #11

Rust certainly needs more GUI component collections. There are lots of GUI toolkits, but a comparatively small number of prebuilt components you can use with any of them. This collection looks quite useful, though the component list is mostly indistinguishable from a list of components for a web framework. The webview component is the only one that seems somewhat specific to native applications. So for something like…

Even though most UI libraries now draw their own widgets some native integration is almost always used/desired. Those integrations are typically: keyboard short cuts, native system menu (macOS), native file dialogs, and (sometimes) native context menus. I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting, but these minimal integrations are a good thing as they give the user some sense of familiarity.

Re: Rust cross-platform GPUI components

#23

Post by nicce »

unwind wrote: post #3

That showcase application (other than Zed) looks awesome, but the very fancy-looking home page [1] fails to have a one-liner explanation of, uh, what the application does . Please consider fixing. [1]: https://longbridge.com/desktop/

I guess they expect that most people come there from the top level domain. (https://longbridge.com)

Re: Rust cross-platform GPUI components

#25

Post by galangalalgol »

nu11ptr wrote: post #14
airstrike wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Rust UI scene is maturing, but the most popular options (iced, egui, dioxus, slint, etc.) aren't even the most complete component-wise atm as far as I can tell. I think part of the issue is that they're still changing so much as we speak. But there's real momentum here and n=1 but I've been able to build incredibly rich, enterprise-ready UI with Rust today.

> I've been able to build incredibly rich, enterprise-ready UI with Rust today. Which UI crate did you use? The word "enterprise" caught my eye. So far I haven't found a Rust UI crate that I found rich enough, so I'm curious your experience.

I think you'll find two definitions of enterprise ready. People who make UIs and are comparing a UI crate to see how it stacks up, and people who write business logic in rust and only care that they were able to make a gui work without switching to some other language. I would put my org in the second situation. Someone bought the thing and didn't complain so good enough I guess. We were using egui.

Re: Rust cross-platform GPUI components

#26

Post by nu11ptr »

galangalalgol wrote: post #25
nu11ptr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been able to build incredibly rich, enterprise-ready UI with Rust today. Which UI crate did you use? The word "enterprise" caught my eye. So far I haven't found a Rust UI crate that I found rich enough, so I'm curious your experience.

I think you'll find two definitions of enterprise ready. People who make UIs and are comparing a UI crate to see how it stacks up, and people who write business logic in rust and only care that they were able to make a gui work without switching to some other language. I would put my org in the second situation. Someone bought the thing and didn't complain so good enough I guess. We were using egui.

Ahh, gotcha. Yeah "enterprise" to me meant: "I can write/maintain a UI rich/polished enough to pass as a 'shrink wrapped' app to my end users".

Thanks for the reply.

Re: Rust cross-platform GPUI components

#28

Post by mdhb »

nu11ptr wrote: post #16
fidotron wrote: post #15

Is this native as in "not web" or native as in actually using native text entry and scrolling widgets? There is quite a huge difference as the Java world discovered.

Pretty sure native as in "not web". AFAIK, everything is drawn using the various GPU APIs (GPUI started with Metal on macOS, for example).

Same model as Flutter which is a million times more pleasant to write and mature at this particular use case which I don’t actually think Rust is well suited to generally speaking.

Re: Rust cross-platform GPUI components

#29

Post by nicce »

nu11ptr wrote: post #2

This looks to be one of the most complete Rust UI creates (in terms of available widgets/components), but unfortunately has almost no usage (yet). I do see their docs are coming along now. Another very complete one is fyrox-ui used by the fyrox game engine: https://crates.io/crates/fyrox-ui . Again, not really used/known outside of fyrox. The Rust UI scene is maturing, but the most popular options (iced, egui, dioxus…

> UPDATE: This honestly looks incredible and makes huge strides in the Rust UI landscape. You can run an impressive widget gallery app here showing all their components:

> https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component/tree/main/crate...

> Just "cargo run --release"

Very impressive! Only thing I am concerned over is that it uses around 900 dependencies. But I don't know whether it much for GUI applications.

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