The state of building user interfaces in Rust

I am heavily invested in Iced. I feel it's a good framework. On a number of occasions it forced me to rethink how to structure my program to match Iced's model. I find the framework very performant and the resulting program easy to prototype and expand upon. I don't do any web development at all, but if I had to, I'd check out Elm, knowing that Iced is inspired by it.

Strengths:

  - Message passing model with separate Model and View paths
  - Async / Sync landscape (sync on the GUI thread, tasks / subscriptions for async stuff with messages returned to the GUI thread)
  - Writing custom Widgets is quite easy! In 0.14 stateful widgets got a revamp and they are quite nice
  - Performance is great
  - Despite being very capable, the framework is not that large. Learning it is not a daunting task
  - Documentation might be sparse, but due to how it's written, I was able to just read the code and understand how it works without issue

Downsides include:

  - Lots of changes between releases (still pre 1.0)
  - Theming. Despite being (somewhat) recently reworked, it's still overcomplicated imo
  - The layouting engine is tricky to use and I fight with it much more than I should. Quite often widgets do not show up at all or take too much space because I didn't use the right combination of `Length` variants for `width` and `height` of the widget (and/or its children)
  - Some interfaces seem a bit weird (I am specifically thinking about overlays)
  - There is some confusion regarding what should go in the application state and what should be held in Widget's state. The interfaces are clearly defined here, but what can be / should be done is often found out in practice (perhaps I lack experience here)

i've recently built a very complex healthcare application in dioxus and it's been a tremendous joy to work with. right now it's web-only, but the app does run fine as a desktop app when we need it.

having SSR built in means that the UX is amazing - really complex pages load basically instantly, and it degrades just as easily for folks that haven't loaded the WASM. server functions were also fantastic to work with and easy to reason about. and, the hot reloading they built means that most UX changes are reloaded within a ~few seconds, meaning iterating is fast and (mostly) painless.

the native component library dioxus has (dioxus-primitives) is... sparse so i did have to build out a hundred or so basic components, but i've done that across various stacks 5-6 times now over my career so it's a fun little journey at this point. for the components they do provide, the quality bar is very good.

I’ve been using GPUI in a side project of mine (TukeySheets.com) and can attest that it is quite nice and it works well on all platforms, at least in my experience. So I would say, definitely “we are gui” in rust.

The component library by long bridge is also well done and reasonably well documented.

Is it common for the toolkits written from scratch in Rust to have bindings for other languages?

I still think the ideal solution for Desktop GUIs would be the Qt company developing first class Qt bindings for Node.js (or some other runtime), and allow people to build UIs using web tech with Qt components.

"no" is reductive to the point of being misleading.

Cosmic DE is built using iced which is a rust gui library. As far as native, single-platform guis go, I'd say rust is plenty mature.

There's also Bevy, a rust game engine, which, if I'm not mistaken is built on egui(?), and I think supports multiple compile targets.

Between a desktop environment and a game engine, I'd say rust is in a pretty decent place when it comes to gui.