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The state of building user interfaces in Rust

areweguiyet.com

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Re: The state of building user interfaces in Rust

#11

Post by rjh29 »

sourcegrift wrote: post #8

qmetaobject-rs gives you the best of both worlds: logic in rust, UI in arguably world's best cross platform framework Qt.

As a "batteries included" framework Qt is undoubtably amazing but I used it on a project recently and it struck me as dated compared to Flutter or React Native. Maybe I'm doing it wrong but I had to write a lot of boilerplate C++ even when using QML. The layout engine feels byzantine. The state management is mostly manual. Flutter is a lot more consistent, reactive, and all done in one way (Dart) and it supports hot reload natively. It was a more pleasant experience overall.

Re: The state of building user interfaces in Rust

#12

Post by jokethrowaway »

my 2 cents:

egui is the clear winner for making desktop applications. I've built a complex application recently (think of it like an AI powered image editor, doing plenty of editor logic and communicating with several python backends for the AI part) and it's been smooth sailing. It would be nice to have a family of components that look native on every platform but nowadays the desktop experience is anyway wildly inconsistent (and web-centric).

Using qt bindings is a good option too, but depending on non rust code means you are more likely to catch some weird crash. My experience with Qt in Rust is years old, so I can't comment on stability.

For frontend development, leptos is really nice and it feels familiar coming from react - but the whole chain is too heavy, your target directory quickly balloons to GBs and that's unacceptable, especially if you have several frontend projects.

I vibe coded a proof of concept leptos (including islands) with a minimal runtime and no dependencies and the size was much more contained. There is margin for improvements but today I would stick with solid.js for frontend development.

The other big hurdle for Rust on the web is the need to compile to wasm. That means that any Rust application will be heavier than a similar app in another JS framework. If we could target js instead of wasm, maybe we could have apps with small bundles.

Re: The state of building user interfaces in Rust

#13

Post by aquariusDue »

sourcegrift wrote: post #8

qmetaobject-rs gives you the best of both worlds: logic in rust, UI in arguably world's best cross platform framework Qt.

I'm a bit out of the loop but I checked out the GitHub repo [0] and while the authors moved onto Slint the crate is still actively maintained. That said I also looked at the latest commits and that threw me down a rabbit hole of finding out that the main maintainer has a blog where he wrote about using Sailfish OS as a daily driver [1] and imagine my surprise when he revealed that he actually co-maintains a Signal client app for SailfishOS too. I looked into the GitLab repo for that app [2] and I gleefully discovered that it's mostly written in Rust, the Cargo.toml contains a dependency to qmetaobject-rs too.

All that is to say that I'm glad there's another way to get Rust on mobile aside from stuff like flutter_rust_bridge.

[0] https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs

[1] https://www.rubdos.be/2026/04/17/my-sailfish-os-journey-apps...

[2] https://gitlab.com/whisperfish/whisperfish

Re: The state of building user interfaces in Rust

#14

Post by segphault »

I’ve been really impressed with GPUI, particularly with Longbridge’s open source component library which provides a bunch of shadcdn-alike widgets that are really well implemented and come with a bunch of tailwind-like helper functions that make layout easy.

The downside is that the dependency stack you need to do gui programming with rust is massive and the compile times are brutal. You can’t beat the application performance, though. It’s crazy how nice it feels compared to bloated electron apps.

The question of “are we gui yet” is definitely yes, at least on the desktop. The problem is that developers are too lazy to build apps with anything other than web frameworks.

Re: The state of building user interfaces in Rust

#15

Post by nopurpose »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #12

my 2 cents: egui is the clear winner for making desktop applications. I've built a complex application recently (think of it like an AI powered image editor, doing plenty of editor logic and communicating with several python backends for the AI part) and it's been smooth sailing. It would be nice to have a family of components that look native on every platform but nowadays the desktop experience is anyway wildly inc…

Did immediate mode guis solve (in)accessibility problem they used to be really bad at?

Re: The state of building user interfaces in Rust

#16

Post by vovavili »

segphault wrote: post #14

I’ve been really impressed with GPUI, particularly with Longbridge’s open source component library which provides a bunch of shadcdn-alike widgets that are really well implemented and come with a bunch of tailwind-like helper functions that make layout easy. The downside is that the dependency stack you need to do gui programming with rust is massive and the compile times are brutal. You can’t beat the application pe…

For me it's not so much laziness, as more of a lack of desire to rely on a framework that Zed core team still feels to be not ready for a general release. Electron just happens to be the least worst way to make an aesthetically pleasing cross-platform desktop app, but the performance trade-off is a major pain point.

GPUI getting the public release greenlight will no doubt be a turning point for desktop GUI development. All it took is a small team of gifted developers to dogfood their own GUI toolkit and get some much-needed VC backing. The future looks very bright.

Re: The state of building user interfaces in Rust

#17

Post by ghosty141 »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #12

my 2 cents: egui is the clear winner for making desktop applications. I've built a complex application recently (think of it like an AI powered image editor, doing plenty of editor logic and communicating with several python backends for the AI part) and it's been smooth sailing. It would be nice to have a family of components that look native on every platform but nowadays the desktop experience is anyway wildly inc…

> Using qt bindings is a good option too, but depending on non rust code means you are more likely to catch some weird crash. My experience with Qt in Rust is years old, so I can't comment on stability.

Qt QML is already annoying in C++ since you have to juggle 2 lifetime systems, c++ manual lifetime management and QMLs QML engine (aka gargabe collection).

Re: The state of building user interfaces in Rust

#19

Post by jph »

#1 thing helping me with GUI Rust is sccache for crate compilation caching. and #2 is building independent-compilable subcrates. This improves build times by 10x.

Also shoutout to ratatui because even though it's technically a TUI not GUI, it's superb.

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