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Comment by actionfromafar | Hacker News Reader

Do you mean it’s no point in writing a GUI toolkit in Rust?

You'd never be able to compete with qt anyway.

You could - if you have several hundred full time developers working on it for years. This probably means you pay them, but the count of full time developers is the important part.

That cant be true. Why does QT need hundred of developers when the core product can be done by a single person? (see Sciter)

Details are hard. The core might be doable in a basic form by one person, but there is a lot more than the core that needs to be done. All those little details add up - they are only a small improvement, but all those small improvements adds to polish.

It would make sense to have a library that can do basic Svg/Canvas things, in Rust. From there, people can write all sorts of GUI libraries.

Yeah but Qt does a lot more, to match Qt you would need a similar effort. I remember some time ago was a popular article shared here on how hard it is to render text when you need to consider all the languages and all the font types and all the options. So it wold be easy to paint some shapes and some english text in the happy case and it would probably be enough for video games but then you need Widgets that will work with different user preferences, different languages, different color schemes, different DPIs, different platform conventions. Then you want to access the clipboard, the App settings folder, the notification system, maybe embed a webview to show soem html content ... Qt does a lot of things if your job is to make a professional complex Desktop application starting from basic building blocks and wasting your time on the Widgets and platform stuff then on business logic is not a good investment. If you are a hobist and writing Rust makes you super happy then I invite yout o continue.

The point is if you start with a good foundational layer, then a community can build greater things on top of it.

Of course, it will take time and if you're looking for a great library that can do everything out of the box, now, then you should pick Qt, there's no doubt about that.

You need a big community that can build a Qt alternative, we have Linux as an example of a community project but the reality is there was a lot of money behind it, so you need a Rust community with a lot of money behind it so developers will be paid to work on the non-cool stuff.

But who'd contribute when qt is already there?

Getting contributions is nearly impossible. Getting them for a not so useful vanity project is probably impossible.

> But who'd contribute when qt is already there?

Because it will be written in pure Rust (with all the memory-safety advantages that come with it).

>Because it will be written in pure Rust (with all the memory-safety advantages that come with it).

I do not think that Rust enthusiasts will waste their free time reimplementing complex, boring stuff in Rust, only if they are paid, otherwise they will work on a new Rust game engine, or TODO app, or AI, WASM or something cool. Something as big and as high quality as Qt can't be implemented by 3 guys in weekends, maybe if they get Patreon support os they can work full time they can get the easy part done.

I do not think Qt suffers from memory issues so nobody would pay to rewrite it, but maybe we will have some super simple GUI framework you could use for GUI in video games or some simple English only , zero customization , simple apps.

Communities forming around a project is one of those things people think happens a lot but doesn't.

Even with effort, meaningful communities are the exception (let's say 1 in 1000 projects) rather than the rule.

There is also a significant random luck/etc aspect that people like to pretend doesn't exist (ie people like to pretend that if you do all the right things you will just end up magically with a community around your project 100% of the time)

the good foundation layer needs to be designed correctly. Otherwise you have SVGs and English, but you have to tear the whole thing up when someone asks for translations. Then someone asked for the next feature and you have to tear it all up again. This is a hard problem.

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