How many of those actually look and behave like native and support accessibility correctly?
Native doesn't really exist on desktops except macOS, but accessibility is a good question.
Rust: State of GUI, December 2022
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Re: Rust: State of GUI, December 2022
#22How many of those actually look and behave like native and support accessibility correctly?
What even is "native" on Windows? Is it Win32? WinForms? WPF? UWP? WinUI? Windows App SDK? There's so many to choose from and they all look and behave differently.
Any of those will do as long as you don't drag in javascript crap.
Re: Rust: State of GUI, December 2022
#23A pretty fun Rust GUI experienc is vgtk[0], which is doing a bunch of macro magic to give a "we're coding in React" vibe to GTK+. I don't really have a specific thing I want to code in a native GUI at the moment but if I did I think this would be the most tempting for me.
Re: Rust: State of GUI, December 2022
#24How many of those actually look and behave like native and support accessibility correctly?
With Slint [https://slint-ui.com], our aim is to achieve native look and feel, and accessibility.
Re: Rust: State of GUI, December 2022
#25Flutter app with rust core works great too.
Re: Rust: State of GUI, December 2022
#26wow, really impressive!
An impressive write up and understanding of the available ecosystem and the way various things stack. Conversely, an appalling advertisement for the state of GUIs with Rust.
More like the state of portable GUI in general, regardless of the programming language.
Re: Rust: State of GUI, December 2022
#27How many of those actually look and behave like native and support accessibility correctly?
This is a core design goal for Pax. https://www.pax-lang.org
Pax composites a layer of native text and form elements on top of a canvas drawing layer. This solves accessibility across platforms, as well SEO on the Web.
This approach also enables a lean runtime footprint (Still early days — have made very little noise thus far; it's pre-alpha — but you can see what's cooking at https://docs.pax-lang.org/ and https://www.github.com/pax-lang/pax
Re: Rust: State of GUI, December 2022
#28Of the UI toolkits listed, it seems like Egui is nicest to use. It's flexible, has a nice collection of built-in widgets, is compatible with 3D graphics APIs (like WGPU), and has a clean API.
Re: Rust: State of GUI, December 2022
#29Sadly Rust for WinUI3/UWP/XAML for Windows GUI - actually modern UIs on Windows - was abandoned or explicitly removed from Rust API bindings by MS. The listed library only uses the ancient win32 api
Any idea why?! I find that the modern WinUI is impossible to use from any language other than .NET.
We yanked it because, sadly, XAML/WinUI is squarely designed to be used with C# and Visual Studio.
See also: https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs/issues/2153#issuecom...
Re: Rust: State of GUI, December 2022
#30One thing I'd like to see are Rust bindings for wxWidgets. Contrary to the prevailing opinion, I think wrappers over native toolkits are a fine approach for cross-platform development.
> Contrary to the prevailing opinion
I'm not sure this is the prevailing opinion. It may be something of a "vocal minority" opinion, but it does seem more common in the Rust community than elsewhere. The closer you get to traditional native app designers and developers, the more you'll hear the opinion that native look & feel (not to mention accessibility) is important to embrace.
IMO an ideal solution is to offer both: 1. to wrap native toolkits for things like text and UI controls, and 2. to enable canvas-drawn virtual controls, for those who would prefer to create their own widgets. These approaches can be enabled in parallel through an extensible widget/component system.