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Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

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Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#11

Post by Klonoar »

KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #5
mcluck wrote: post #4

> GUI in Rust progresses with unprecedented speed – 3 months in Rust GUI-land is like 3 years in the mortal world. areweguiyet.rs was started almost exactly 5 years ago. That means it's been about 60 mortal years and we still don't have a definitive solution to GUIs.

That's because Rust GUI people are like Lispers and functional programmers — too obsessed with doing things correctly "from first principles" and "purity". For GUI programming, there is only one feature that matters: having a fuck ton of well supported widgets for every situation across every platform. Almost everything else is secondary. This is why HTML/CSS, Flutter (and to a lesser extent Qt) are so successful. No…

>That's because Rust GUI people are like Lispers and functional programmers — too obsessed with doing things correctly "from first principles" and "purity".

That's... entirely wrong and not necessary to paint swathes of developers like.

Rust has numerous solutions for native GUIs. People ship apps with those stacks. Rust also has things like Tauri for when you don't want to deal with differences across platforms.

Just because there's not one blessed solution doesn't mean it's not possible to write UIs in Rust today. ;P

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#12

Post by KRAKRISMOTT »

vbezhenar wrote: post #9
KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because Rust GUI people are like Lispers and functional programmers — too obsessed with doing things correctly "from first principles" and "purity". For GUI programming, there is only one feature that matters: having a fuck ton of well supported widgets for every situation across every platform. Almost everything else is secondary. This is why HTML/CSS, Flutter (and to a lesser extent Qt) are so successful. No…

I'd argue that the most successful UI platform is a browser. And guess what? Browser does not have a fuck ton of well supported widgets. All it does it some button with outdated UI, few inputs nobody really uses and dropdown select suitable only for the most basic uses. Anything other built on divs with CSS and JS. And it works. So my opinion is that it's definitely solid foundations what matters. Rest will come with…

The browser is successful not because it has a solid foundation but because a ridiculous amount of engineering effort has been put into it. Most of the "beautiful foundation" you see are all post 2012. You young'uns don't remember the days before HTML5 and CSS3. Before npm and PWAs and the "cloud native" nonsense.

Adobe Flash anyone? Silverlight? Before WebAssembly/WebGL/WebGPU unity (yes that game engine) even required a browser plugin. Web browsers were often severely incompatible with each other and web standards were a suggestion at best. Now, it's bad form to slander dead people so I will just say that the nice kind folks at apple under the orders of their dear leader did their best to destroy as much of the pre-2012 web as possible by gatekeeping the iPhone browser and using their market power to strong arm web technology.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#13

Post by jenadine »

CJefferson wrote: post #6

Searched for “accessibility” — 0 results (I couldn’t see anything skimming down the page). Speaking as a Rust user, everyone in Rust land loves insulting Electron, but they have put some solid work into accessibility. In particular, using WASM to draw text with webgl or canvas, instead of DOM, may in the long term be one of the biggest steps back in accessibility ever.

Desktop solutions don't use wasm/canvas for their primary use. Although you can wasm to compile it for web demo, they are primarily meant to be used as native apps outside of a browser.

I know Slint and egui have accessibility support.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#14

Post by jenadine »

vbezhenar wrote: post #9
KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because Rust GUI people are like Lispers and functional programmers — too obsessed with doing things correctly "from first principles" and "purity". For GUI programming, there is only one feature that matters: having a fuck ton of well supported widgets for every situation across every platform. Almost everything else is secondary. This is why HTML/CSS, Flutter (and to a lesser extent Qt) are so successful. No…

I'd argue that the most successful UI platform is a browser. And guess what? Browser does not have a fuck ton of well supported widgets. All it does it some button with outdated UI, few inputs nobody really uses and dropdown select suitable only for the most basic uses. Anything other built on divs with CSS and JS. And it works. So my opinion is that it's definitely solid foundations what matters. Rest will come with…

People dont't simply use CSS and JS to build UI for web apps, they use web frameworks that comes with their share of supported components. And there are also a bunch of these framework to choose from, they come and go.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#15

Post by eviks »

Is there a good detailed table with features filter for various frameworks?

For example, maybe you feel that VDOM is pure overhead and want to hide all frameworks that use it.

It's a bit disorienting to read many rather shallow lists with all the various frameworks without a proper convenient way to compare them

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#16

Post by preommr »

The biggest problem is that there is no dominant solution. Right now having a rust-based app is a luxury when there are easier albeit 'dirtier' solutions. I don't have to build something in rust and I am dreadfully afraid that I'll spend hundreds of hours building something only for an altenrative to be the emergent solution forcing an expensive rewrite.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#17

Post by TobyTheDog123 »

This may not be the message of the article but as a side-rant:

I really don't understand the use-case for a Rust-based GUI.

Rust's syntax, manual memory management, and compile times makes it seem like it's really not meant for this kind of workload, but instead for things like compilers, embedded systems, that kind of thing.

I understand that not every UI needs to be a cross-platform blah blah blah written in TypeJavaReactScriptJS, or a pixel-painted canvas written in Flutter. I also understand there's a use-case for one-off UIs that may not target a browser.

Let's compare it to something like Golang. Fast compile times, similar libraries, garbage collection -- it seems like something more suited for UIs where there are usually a lot more iterations. Worse performance for sure, but Rust also seems more-than-overkill in that regard for the UI use-case.

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#18

Post by setr »

KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #12
vbezhenar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that the most successful UI platform is a browser. And guess what? Browser does not have a fuck ton of well supported widgets. All it does it some button with outdated UI, few inputs nobody really uses and dropdown select suitable only for the most basic uses. Anything other built on divs with CSS and JS. And it works. So my opinion is that it's definitely solid foundations what matters. Rest will come with…

The browser is successful not because it has a solid foundation but because a ridiculous amount of engineering effort has been put into it. Most of the "beautiful foundation" you see are all post 2012. You young'uns don't remember the days before HTML5 and CSS3. Before npm and PWAs and the "cloud native" nonsense. Adobe Flash anyone? Silverlight? Before WebAssembly/WebGL/WebGPU unity (yes that game engine) even requi…

I can’t figure out if you are for post-2012 web tech or against it

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#19

Post by eviks »

CJefferson wrote: post #6

Searched for “accessibility” — 0 results (I couldn’t see anything skimming down the page). Speaking as a Rust user, everyone in Rust land loves insulting Electron, but they have put some solid work into accessibility. In particular, using WASM to draw text with webgl or canvas, instead of DOM, may in the long term be one of the biggest steps back in accessibility ever.

There's AccessKit that's integrated in a couple of frameworks (egui is one)

(but hopefully it'd be a temporary step back)

Re: Emerging Rust GUI libraries in a WASM world

#20

Post by chrismorgan »

Klonoar wrote: post #11
KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because Rust GUI people are like Lispers and functional programmers — too obsessed with doing things correctly "from first principles" and "purity". For GUI programming, there is only one feature that matters: having a fuck ton of well supported widgets for every situation across every platform. Almost everything else is secondary. This is why HTML/CSS, Flutter (and to a lesser extent Qt) are so successful. No…

>That's because Rust GUI people are like Lispers and functional programmers — too obsessed with doing things correctly "from first principles" and "purity". That's... entirely wrong and not necessary to paint swathes of developers like. Rust has numerous solutions for native GUIs. People ship apps with those stacks. Rust also has things like Tauri for when you don't want to deal with differences across platforms. Jus…

It’s not entirely wrong. Rust GUI has been held up by a significant dose of trying to do things properly, since the language definitely pushes you in that direction. It’s taken so long because Rust insists on correctness and on an ownership model that the popular solutions for GUIs simply didn’t fit into, so it’s taken time to come up with things that do work in those constraints.
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