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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

So still not ready yet and is still not mature or production ready either.

Until there is a mature library that is able to compete with Electron or Qt then I'm afraid that Rust is not a sensible choice for serious cross-platform GUI development at this time.

Like I said before [0] With these libraries, All you get is a mixture of unmaintained or unstable bindings that may break when the GUI library that it is using changes its API.

No thanks and no deal.

To Downvoters: So you are telling me that you can confidently recommend to any engineering shop to develop a very complex GUI app with either of these unstable libraries faster in Rust than one who uses JS/TS with Electron?

Even though I hate Electron, I can see why it is always chosen. Rust for GUI development? I don't think so, especially if you have a short time to release something complex and used by thousands into production.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24537300

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It's unfortunate, but I agree with you regarding native Rust libraries.

There is a reason why we don't have options in this domain, apart from Qt, Gtk (with lot's of caveats) and more recently flutter.

Building a cross platform native UI toolkit is an immense amount of work.

It took Google a long time to turn Flutter into a decent option just for Android and iOS, and the newer desktop integrations are still very rough after years of work.

All for Rust implementations are not at all viable for professional usage, and won't get there without major corporate backing.

That said, the gtk bindings are in a good shape and very usable.

Are there startups that still write desktop GUI applications? Maybe I'm just not informed, but most just seem to be an instance of chrome (aka electron) written to directly call a website or reuse the web application locally.

If I'm not wrong and something doesn't change, we'll find ourselves surrounded by electron apps on our desktops.

The GTK bindings are being used pretty heavily by a few GNOME projects now, so I would expect them to continue to get the maintenance effort.

It's a heck of a lot easier to bind to an existing GUI library than writing the equivalent of GTK from scratch. But all languages have this problem, and most of them don't have Microsoft's ability to generate multiple different and incompatible GUI toolkits to suit the fashion of them time.

Since they decided to kill Glade, it kind of lost the appeal to anyone that actually does UI/UX.

As others have already mentioned in the thread, they didn’t kill it, it is just not compatible with GTK4 out of the window. But a similar program for that is being done.

Downvotes on HN happen because something you said pisses of certain people, not just because something you said is wrong.

That said, I think you're right, and I don't see what makes Rust particularly suitable for UI work. I'd just do the UI part in web tech.

I didn't downvote you but I can see why some may downvote you and it would just come down to "how" you said it, not necessarily the substance. It is all about delivery and that can be improved to be a bit more friendly. There are a lot of people working on this, it seems, and the tone that I felt from your comment was "pfttt, still not good enough". So that is why I _think_ you got down voted, but I don't know for sure.

Tauri competes with Electron, and is a viable alternative. There are milestones they haven't hit yet ( https://tauri.studio/en/?hn ), but many of the features needed are there already.

yep. Harsh judgement but true judgement. Now there's rust-qt but I dunno how good it is.

It uses a lot of unsafe rust code. Here an example https://github.com/rust-qt/examples/blob/master/widgets/basi...

I'm not sure what's the advantage of using unsafe code everywhere in Rust compared to just using C/C++. The syntax?

Being part of a bigger Rust project? The GUI is just one component after all.

Even for unsafe code Rust was designed to be more ergonomic than C (like pointer arithmetic operations). That said a safe wrapper would be preferred to unsafe everywhere.

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