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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

#31

Post by rendaw »

Throwing in my vote... I've been doing everything with wasm-bindgen/web-sys, i.e. just doing my UIs in html, and for 99% that's what I'd want anyways. Web UIs are portable, remotely accessible, and don't require installation on each client.

For the small percent that's left where speed is critical, I've just been using wgpu and wgsl-bindgen directly.

I can't think of what I'd want a native UI solution for. And then having to deal with porting it to iOS, Android, Windows, Mac etc, dealing with app stores (3+?) submissions, developer fees, rejections... vs just using HTML which works on all platforms. I don't think I'd use a native UI even if there was one. Not that HTML is great by any stretch...

(I made Sunwet, this is what my stuff looks like: https://github.com/andrewbaxter/sunwet )

Re: The state of building user interfaces in Rust

#32

Post by Fraterkes »

This isn’t Rust-specific, but I’m always slightly surprised I don’t see more people talk about Pangui (https://www.pangui.io/) (it not being out yet is a pretty good reason I guess). If the demos on the site aren’t vaporware, it seems to me like a really promising addition to the current options for desktop gui dev.

Re: The state of building user interfaces in Rust

#33

Post by brandnewideas »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #6
Severian wrote: post #2

Uhhh.. for a page thats about GUIs, this seems awfully sparse for the actual look and feel of said GUIs. How about some screenshots? Its very difficult to compare X to Y anywhere on this site. Its just an aggregator, not really an exemplary resource.

Yes, I think it's trying to be comprehensive (as far as possible) rather than detailed. Given the amount of frameworks listed, including representative screenshots or comparisons for each would be a substantial effort. The best primer on the current(ish) state of GUI programming in Rust, IMO, is this article from 2025 which is linked on that page: https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-...

Opening that site prompts my browser to download a `Human_fart.wav` file.

Re: The state of building user interfaces in Rust

#34

Post by sgt »

rjh29 wrote: post #11
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…

And React has that "web development" ecosystem taint... I'd definitely lean towards Flutter in this case. It's neat, tidy and a contained ecosystem. It may not be fully perfect, but for cross platform UI's I think it's the way to go.

My only question is - say if one uses Rust, is flutter_rust_bridge the way to go?

Re: The state of building user interfaces in Rust

#35

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #29

I’m not well-versed in Rust, but as far as I’m aware there’s a somewhat low hard cap on how ergonomic a fully Rust “old style” imperative OO UI framework (like AppKit/UIKit) can be, which is unfortunate as I find that style easiest to work with for complex desktop apps. I wish there were more memory safe compiled languages that focused on ergonomics for cases like this.

One of the reasons I started messing around with Zig.

Re: The state of building user interfaces in Rust

#36

Post by nixpulvis »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #29

I’m not well-versed in Rust, but as far as I’m aware there’s a somewhat low hard cap on how ergonomic a fully Rust “old style” imperative OO UI framework (like AppKit/UIKit) can be, which is unfortunate as I find that style easiest to work with for complex desktop apps. I wish there were more memory safe compiled languages that focused on ergonomics for cases like this.

What makes you say that exactly?

Re: The state of building user interfaces in Rust

#37

Post by ajs1998 »

Fraterkes wrote: post #32

This isn’t Rust-specific, but I’m always slightly surprised I don’t see more people talk about Pangui ( https://www.pangui.io/ ) (it not being out yet is a pretty good reason I guess). If the demos on the site aren’t vaporware, it seems to me like a really promising addition to the current options for desktop gui dev.

Looks pretty neat. I'm a little disappointed about a closed beta though.

Re: The state of building user interfaces in Rust

#38

Post by [deleted] »

neonstatic wrote: post #22

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…

[deleted]

Re: The state of building user interfaces in Rust

#39

Post by Levitating »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #29

I’m not well-versed in Rust, but as far as I’m aware there’s a somewhat low hard cap on how ergonomic a fully Rust “old style” imperative OO UI framework (like AppKit/UIKit) can be, which is unfortunate as I find that style easiest to work with for complex desktop apps. I wish there were more memory safe compiled languages that focused on ergonomics for cases like this.

Rust doesn't play well with traditional frameworks but works fairly well with Elm and immediate mode.
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