posts/shades-of-rust-gui-library-list

[utterances-bot]

50 Shades of Rust, or emerging Rust GUIs in a WASM world

An overview of Rust GUI libraries and frameworks, focused on WASM. Discover the latest GUI toolkit options for Rust, increase your programming skills, and create efficient WebAssembly bundles that will help you build comprehensive applications.

https://monadical.com/posts/shades-of-rust-gui-library-list.html

[SamuelMarks]

Interesting for sure, but still annoying that no one has figured out a native widget toolkit rendering solution like wxWidgets, IUP, or NAppGUI. These provide native look-and-feel, accessibility, and vastly reduced binary sizes (and sometimes speed improvements). In terms of web rendering, you can from GTK with Broadway though it's not quite the WASM experience…

[nptr]

There was iui which provided a real native and multiplatform GUI, although it is now seemingly abandoned.

I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I did update and extend it recently under the name libui.
Good enough for tools, but like most Rust UI libs, I wouldn't do mission critical stuff with it.

[jaens]

Most of these "non-native"/"re-inventing the wheel" GUI toolkits are very frustrating to use for regular desktop apps due to severe lack of functionality, except for games, where horrible user experience is expected...

As someone who's tried to (productively) use apps based on them, I really wish people stopped using these.

eg.:

• No accessibility eg. text<->speech, font sizes, colors, keyboard/mouse settings, animation settings, auto-focus.
• No platform-specific keyboard shortcuts and expected behavior.
• Missing handling of various edge cases in eg. focus handling or text editing.
• No support for languages that require an IME to enter text.
• No proper copy-paste (in some cases).
• No drag-and-drop.
• No integration with desktop automation software (~accessibility again).

...to give a few examples.

[nptr]

I really wish people stopped using these.

On the bright side, it increases the chance of getting usable versions for Linux