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Comment by sandGorgon | Hacker News Reader

Since Rust was born out of a vision to build the next-gen browser engine, does anyone know why Rust does not have bindings to GTK ? The only two projects (on github) are 1-2 years old.

I was hoping Rust could overtake Vala as the goto language for desktop software in the GTK world.

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In my experience, Rust is currently in a phase where the correct answer to "I'd love to use rust for xyz, why doesn't it have support for that?" is typically "that's a good idea, you should add that!". That's either exciting or frustrating depending on your point of view. Unfortunately, the next logical question of "ok, how do I make and distribute a library?" currently doesn't have a satisfying answer, as they've just scrapped the package manager. It sounds like they want to hire somebody to work full-time on a replacement, so hopefully that is a temporary problem.

Servo is focusing on the layout engine. Think of it as an alternative to Gecko or Webkit, not Firefox or Chrome

It's highly likely that will happen anytime soon.

Jürg Billeter created Vala for the sole purpose of building GTK / GNOME applications and the two projects are tightly coupled.

It's not to say that Rust won't have GTK bindings in the future, but it's not a high priority for either Mozilla or GNOME devs and unlikely to displace Vala.

is that so ?

I would have thought that considering they are building a browser that was originally written in C-GTK, the first order of business would be to build GTK bindings.

I would say Vala and Rust do have fairly similar goals in general.

P.S. I know right now Servo != Firefox, but I suppose it will get there eventually.

Servo isn't even a project to build a browser. It's just a project to build the rendering engine. I'd guess that none of the interesting work they're focusing on overlaps with any of the user-interface chrome where GTK would become relevant.

>the two projects are tightly coupled

Vala is only coupled with GLib for the object system and even that can be replaced by using another profile: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala/Tutorial#Profiles

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