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Comment by pdntspa | Hacker News Reader

Are there any cross-platform native UIs for Rust? Something like wxWidgets or GTK?

You can use GTK from Rust. But the Rust native ones aren't really there yet. [Iced](https://github.com/iced-rs/iced) which has been picked up by System76 and [Druid](https://github.com/linebender/druid) (and it's next gen version [Xilem](https://github.com/linebender/xilem)) are the ones to watch, along with Dioxus which is the main post here.

I'd expect there to be something useable by the end of 2023.

You forgot to mention [Slint](https://github.com/slint-ui/slint)

> picked up by System76

I missed that. Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33066593 and some updates and upstream contributions in https://blog.system76.com/post/november-at-system76-products...

The question is why would you want something like that? Native is meaningless on non-Apple platforms. For Windows, wx is nowadays the opposite of a modern native Windows app, because it uses Win32. Gtk is "best viewed on" a Gtk-based Linux desktop. Qt Widgets, much like wx, emulates the LAF of Win32, so doesn't look correct any more on Windows. Qt Quick is a modern hardware-accelerated UI toolkit, but that's not a unique thing any more.

> For Windows, wx is nowadays the opposite of a modern native Windows app, because it uses Win32.

idk, whenever I have to use win32 and I see some app which uses the win32 widgets i'm like, "finally some good software"

I would certainly prefer properly written native software to web-based junk pretending to be native.

I guess you can consider me a fan of WinForms. Besides, you can change the background color and add a stupid amount of padding to everything and voila, you now have "modern". Hell I used to have something for C# that did exactly that and made WinForms apps look like they were made for Windows 10. It was pretty cool, ngl

I've been tinkering with wxPython since I can't get pygobject to work in Python 3 in Windows. It really isn't that bad, certainly not nearly as weird as trying to wrap my head around folks' awful (are they ever not?) React codebases and this moronic idea that everything has to bundle Chromium

Also you really can't beat an instantaneous cold startup time. It's the tits

Why is anything based on Win32 not native on Windows? As far as I know, it's the only way to create a window on Windows.

> The question is why would you want something like that?

Simple. You want to be able to make cross-platform UIs that are more performant, less resource-intensive, and more extensible than electron apps.

> The question is why would you want something like that?

Some of us want stable software that feels fast and responsive and doesn't lag on high-end machines while using 2GB of RAM despite being extremely simple

There are some, the most promising of which to me are slint (runs anywhere, includes custom IDL), druid (from the xi-editor folks) and xilem (new architecture, from the druid folks)

I‘d probably look into Skia first, it also drives Flutter. https://github.com/rust-skia/rust-skia

It doesn’t render native widgets though, AFAIK it’s „just“ OpenGL/Metal/Vulkan/CPU-rasterization.

EDIT: Someone is already working on a Skia adapter for Dioxus: https://github.com/marc2332/freya

Skia is cool. But I don't think it's going to end up being the solution for Rust graphics. There are already rust-native libraries that do most of what Skia does, and they're a lot easier to build.

I'd like to know the name of these libraries.

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