The state of building user interfaces in Rust

For the small percent that's left where speed is critical, I've just been using wgpu and wgsl-bindgen directly.

I can't think of what I'd want a native UI solution for. And then having to deal with porting it to iOS, Android, Windows, Mac etc, dealing with app stores (3+?) submissions, developer fees, rejections... vs just using HTML which works on all platforms. I don't think I'd use a native UI even if there was one. Not that HTML is great by any stretch...

(I made Sunwet, this is what my stuff looks like: https://github.com/andrewbaxter/sunwet )

EGUI bonus: Good integration with WGPU, so you can show 3D things as part of your UI.

Complaining time: Historically, syncing winit, EGUI, WGPU, the binder between GPU and EGUI, and EGUI libs like for file dialogs has been a pain. It gives me anxiety thinking about upgrading versions. That said... the teams are sometimes shockingly fast about syncing their UIs. It is when winnit or WGPU etc make big breaking changes (Often from accumulation over time) where things get hairy!

Ralph Levien, author of druid and xilem made some good posts about it. I'll link one here.

https://raphlinus.github.io/rust/gui/2022/07/15/next-dozen-g...

I wish there were more memory safe compiled languages that focused on ergonomics for cases like this.

https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs/tree/master/crates/s...

It's a react-style API for WinUI3 apps, meaning it's not trying to mimic the Windows LAF. It's merely a binding.

The downside is that the dependency stack you need to do gui programming with rust is massive and the compile times are brutal. You can’t beat the application performance, though. It’s crazy how nice it feels compared to bloated electron apps.

The question of “are we gui yet” is definitely yes, at least on the desktop. The problem is that developers are too lazy to build apps with anything other than web frameworks.

For desktop app development, if I don’t care about native controls (and what does that mean in Linux or even post-Win32, anyway?) and don’t want to deal with Electron, why not use something a bit more established like Avalonia or Flutter?

Also shoutout to ratatui because even though it's technically a TUI not GUI, it's superb.

I still think the ideal solution for Desktop GUIs would be the Qt company developing first class Qt bindings for Node.js (or some other runtime), and allow people to build UIs using web tech with Qt components.

How about some screenshots?

Its very difficult to compare X to Y anywhere on this site. Its just an aggregator, not really an exemplary resource.

Strengths:

  - Message passing model with separate Model and View paths
  - Async / Sync landscape (sync on the GUI thread, tasks / subscriptions for async stuff with messages returned to the GUI thread)
  - Writing custom Widgets is quite easy! In 0.14 stateful widgets got a revamp and they are quite nice
  - Performance is great
  - Despite being very capable, the framework is not that large. Learning it is not a daunting task
  - Documentation might be sparse, but due to how it's written, I was able to just read the code and understand how it works without issue

  - Lots of changes between releases (still pre 1.0)
  - Theming. Despite being (somewhat) recently reworked, it's still overcomplicated imo
  - The layouting engine is tricky to use and I fight with it much more than I should. Quite often widgets do not show up at all or take too much space because I didn't use the right combination of `Length` variants for `width` and `height` of the widget (and/or its children)
  - Some interfaces seem a bit weird (I am specifically thinking about overlays)
  - There is some confusion regarding what should go in the application state and what should be held in Widget's state. The interfaces are clearly defined here, but what can be / should be done is often found out in practice (perhaps I lack experience here)

That’s crazy. It’s still better than the UX’s that game engine designers think work. Sure bro, show me your File Open/Save Dialog and tree view. Show me your text editor (nicely done, zed)

having SSR built in means that the UX is amazing - really complex pages load basically instantly, and it degrades just as easily for folks that haven't loaded the WASM. server functions were also fantastic to work with and easy to reason about. and, the hot reloading they built means that most UX changes are reloaded within a ~few seconds, meaning iterating is fast and (mostly) painless.

the native component library dioxus has (dioxus-primitives) is... sparse so i did have to build out a hundred or so basic components, but i've done that across various stacks 5-6 times now over my career so it's a fun little journey at this point. for the components they do provide, the quality bar is very good.

egui is the clear winner for making desktop applications. I've built a complex application recently (think of it like an AI powered image editor, doing plenty of editor logic and communicating with several python backends for the AI part) and it's been smooth sailing. It would be nice to have a family of components that look native on every platform but nowadays the desktop experience is anyway wildly inconsistent (and web-centric).

Using qt bindings is a good option too, but depending on non rust code means you are more likely to catch some weird crash. My experience with Qt in Rust is years old, so I can't comment on stability.

For frontend development, leptos is really nice and it feels familiar coming from react - but the whole chain is too heavy, your target directory quickly balloons to GBs and that's unacceptable, especially if you have several frontend projects.

I vibe coded a proof of concept leptos (including islands) with a minimal runtime and no dependencies and the size was much more contained. There is margin for improvements but today I would stick with solid.js for frontend development.

The other big hurdle for Rust on the web is the need to compile to wasm. That means that any Rust application will be heavier than a similar app in another JS framework. If we could target js instead of wasm, maybe we could have apps with small bundles.