51–60 of 156 posts
For desktop app development, if I don’t care about native controls (and what does that mean in Linux or even post-Win32, anyway?) and don’t want to deal with Electron, why not use something a bit more established like Avalonia or Flutter?
Building a GUI framework in Rust comes with certain challenges. Ralph Levien, author of druid and xilem made some good posts about it. I'll link one here. https://raphlinus.github.io/rust/gui/2022/07/15/next-dozen-g...
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…
Check out: https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component
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…
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?
While imperative retain mode frameworks are technically possible in Rust, my understanding is that there’s a level of unavoidable ceremony and syntax ugliness (unless safety is discarded, which defeats the point of using Rust).
EGUI bonus: Good integration with WGPU, so you can show 3D things as part of your UI.
Complaining time: Historically, syncing winit, EGUI, WGPU, the binder between GPU and EGUI, and EGUI libs like for file dialogs has been a pain. It gives me anxiety thinking about upgrading versions. That said... the teams are sometimes shockingly fast about syncing their UIs. It is when winnit or WGPU etc make big breaking changes (Often from accumulation over time) where things get hairy!
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…
GPUI is developed alongside Zed and thus features that aren't useful for Zed are sometimes left behind. I think there was a community fork recently that tried to tend to these concerns. It's not a bad thing per se, but its worth mentioning.
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 h…
saving this comment, this echos my own thinking, html is not great but its better than dealing with all those things you listed.
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…
> egui is the clear winner for making desktop applications I disagree. It's the easiest to get started with, but it looks pretty terrible (poor font rendering especially), and immediate mode has serious downsides. My current favourite is https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component
https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs/tree/master/crates/s...
It's a react-style API for WinUI3 apps, meaning it's not trying to mimic the Windows LAF. It's merely a binding.