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I Switched from Flutter and Rust to Rust and Egui

jdiaz97.github.io

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Re: I Switched from Flutter and Rust to Rust and Egui

#3

Post by kjuulh »

I actually wanted to ask you about this at our last meetup (Rust Aarhus), so nice to see it on hackernews. It did seem you switched away from flutter. ;)

How is shipping egui apps vs flutter. I'd imagine that especially shipping a rust integration with Flutter might be a bit of a pain

Re: I Switched from Flutter and Rust to Rust and Egui

#4

Post by strogonoff »

Immediate mode GUIs are cool but it seems that accessibility support is somewhat lacking. In native frameworks you often get it for free, on the Web you can follow ARIA and get it for free, but with immediate mode GUIs it seems that it is always a bit of an afterthought. For example, it seems that egui supports AccessKit, but not when used on the Web. With Dear ImGui it seems worse, there is some effort in that direction but tickets about accessibility are open (this is based on a quick scan, I may be wrong).

I guess it makes sense since immediate mode focuses on speed and applications like games, but if only there was best of both worlds.

Re: I Switched from Flutter and Rust to Rust and Egui

#6

Post by jeroenhd »

feverzsj wrote: post #5

I still prefer good old GUI frameworks with WYSIWYG designers.

I think Slint is getting pretty close to that these days: https://slint.dev/

No quick and easy drag&drop just yet, but IDE support for live preview rendering makes it come pretty close. I do long for the Visual Studio GUI design days, but things aren't as barebones anymore as they used to be in open source Rust land.

Re: I Switched from Flutter and Rust to Rust and Egui

#7

Post by merksoftworks »

So egui is great for projects where the application runtime is short lived, or for overlays in longer lived projects. The visual equivalent of scripts, where you know you need a small amount of immediate visual feedback and tweaking parameters for it to be useful to the end user.

Flutter answers questions about more robust UI.

It's good that you chose the right tool for the job and more people should know that there are options. But fundamentally I'm most motivated by the possibility of a robust UI framework made from first principles to be as low friction as egui but with the accessibility, performance, and visual flexibility of stylable retained mode guis.

Raph Levien and the xilem project might be getting us closer.

Re: I Switched from Flutter and Rust to Rust and Egui

#8

Post by wdroz »

I also prefer the mental model of immediate mode, but when I played with Dioxus[0] for a rust fullstack hobby project[1], I was able to adapt.

I liked the DX with the tools and the `rsx!` macro. The use of `#[cfg(feature = "server")]` to define server-side code is interesting, it lets you keep a shared codebase for frontend and backend, while still controlling what gets compiled to WASM for the client.

[0] -- https://dioxuslabs.com/

[1] -- https://blazingboard.ch/ (not mobile friendly, sorry)

Re: I Switched from Flutter and Rust to Rust and Egui

#9

Post by Aeolun »

merksoftworks wrote: post #7

So egui is great for projects where the application runtime is short lived, or for overlays in longer lived projects. The visual equivalent of scripts, where you know you need a small amount of immediate visual feedback and tweaking parameters for it to be useful to the end user. Flutter answers questions about more robust UI. It's good that you chose the right tool for the job and more people should know that there…

If your UI is fast enough, why not in complex UI’s either? I’d say it gives you good motivation to keep your UI handling code as fast as possible.
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