The simplest examples have over a thousand (literally) dependencies. Amongst them, are GTK, GDK, pango, etc. It literally depends on another toolkit, which is the weirdest thing IMHO.
I think this is pretty common on Linux. You would want to GTK (or Qt) I would think to draw the top level window and perhaps system menus, etc. even though the UI itself is drawn using a GPU canvas.
This looks to be one of the most complete Rust UI creates (in terms of available widgets/components), but unfortunately has almost no usage (yet). I do see their docs are coming along now. Another very complete one is fyrox-ui used by the fyrox game engine: https://crates.io/crates/fyrox-ui. Again, not really used/known outside of fyrox.
The Rust UI scene is maturing, but the most popular options (iced, egui, dioxus, slint, etc.) aren't even the most complete component-wise atm as far as I can tell.
UPDATE: This honestly looks incredible and makes huge strides in the Rust UI landscape. You can run an impressive widget gallery app here showing all their components:
> The Rust UI scene is maturing, but the most popular options (iced, egui, dioxus, slint, etc.) aren't even the most complete component-wise atm as far as I can tell.
I think part of the issue is that they're still changing so much as we speak. But there's real momentum here and n=1 but I've been able to build incredibly rich, enterprise-ready UI with Rust today.
> I've been able to build incredibly rich, enterprise-ready UI with Rust today.
Which UI crate did you use? The word "enterprise" caught my eye. So far I haven't found a Rust UI crate that I found rich enough, so I'm curious your experience.
I think you'll find two definitions of enterprise ready. People who make UIs and are comparing a UI crate to see how it stacks up, and people who write business logic in rust and only care that they were able to make a gui work without switching to some other language. I would put my org in the second situation. Someone bought the thing and didn't complain so good enough I guess. We were using egui.
The notion of shrink wrapped software dates us I think? But to that end, I have elements of so many different native looks jumbled around in my head all the way back to amiga workbench (deluxe paint was the best), that anything without really obvious flaws like off centered text or unresponsive buttons feels shrinkwrappable to me. By my standard any of these looks is enterprise ready. I remember someone at MS looking at a gui made by a team my friend was on and mocking it for looking like it was out of tron with saturated colors on a black background in high contrast instead of "modern" 3d grey buttons. It looked a lot more like the linked UI than anything MS was producing at the time. So there is the fashion aspect of it. You want to stand out, but not too much. I think that is the aspect I'm unable to judge. If everything is in the first or second place I look, I just won't care.
Cool. Any publicly available source code? If not, any screenshots at least? I'm curious as what Iced is capable of (with extra widgets/themes/etc. like you mentioned).
Since you think the UI scene is maturing: Where do I find 1. design docs and 2. debugging infra docs (Validation, Testing, Stepping, Logging, Tracing, Recording, Scheduling, Reversal Computing as typical ones) and/or how to apply them ?
> UPDATE: This honestly looks incredible and makes huge strides in the Rust UI landscape. You can run an impressive widget gallery app here showing all their components:
That did seem excessive to me as well. I do worry about the DX of trying to work on an app with this. After each edit, I would expect a solid compile time to simply try your work.
I don't think GPUI has it integrated yet, but Dioxus's Subsecond tool [0] implements binary hot-patching for Rust apps which can help alieviate this problem.
The other thing you can do (which is popular in the Bevy community) is to compiile the "core runtime" into dynamic library. Then you don't need to recompile that set of crates for incremental builds.
> The other thing you can do (which is popular in the Bevy community) is to compile the "core runtime" into dynamic library. Then you don't need to recompile that set of crates for incremental builds.
I'm curious as to what this means exactly. Are you saying keep the UI stuff in a separate crate from rest of app or ???. And just a separate or an actual dynlib? (wouldn't that imply C ABI? would make it a pain to interface with it)
An actual dynlib (containing the core framework crates that typically dont change between compiles (and which in C world might be installed as precompiled system libraries)).
It doesn't necessarily require C ABI. Rust doesn't make any guarantees about stability of the Rust ABI. But if you compile the app and the dynlib with the same compiler version then it works in practice (and IIRC there are enough things relying on this that this is unlikely to break in future).
That does mean you need to recompile the dynlib when you upgrade the compiler, but that is probably infrequent enough not to be a huge issue. Certainly if your aim is fast-recompiles in response to e.g. ui style changes then it ought to work.
--
A note on the sort of Rust compile times I see for a TodoMVC app using my Rust UI framework (412 dependencies):
- A clean release build (-O3) is 1m 01s
- An incremental (-03) rebuild is 1.7s
- A clean debug build (-O0) is 35s
- An incremental debug build (-O0) is 1s
That's on a 2021 MacBook M1 Pro which is fairly fast, but I hear the M4 machines are ~twice as fast. And that's also without any fancy tricks.
I did some quick research. I knew Rust ABI was unstable, but I didn't realize you could create Rust ABI dynlib and Rust would automatically dynamically link it. For intra-app it would work just fine. Neat. Link: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75903098/dynamic-linking...
However, I don't see what advantage this gives. You are going to specify that dependency in your Cargo.toml just like any statically linked crate. Anything that would invalidate the cache for a static crate would invalidate it for a dynamic linked crate. Iow, it seems like separate crates are the magic here, not the linking type. What am I missing?
Thanks for the build stats. Those are helpful. I have an M1 Max currently.
UPDATE: Good points below. As a dynlib it would create a boundary for sure (no LTO, etc.). Worth playing with, thx.
I believe it may "just" be faster link times. Which may seem minor, but link times can often dominate incremental compile times because it's a slow and (at least historically) serial step which is O(total code size) even if the actual compilation is incremental.
See mold's linking benchmarks: https://github.com/rui314/mold. It can be the difference between multiple 10s of seconds with traditional linkers vs <2s with newers ones.
There are few strategies for dealing with this:
1. Is just to use a faster multi-threaded linker. On Linux, lld, mold, and wild on Linux are all much faster than the traditional ld/gold (and the latter two another step above lld). On macOS, the new built-in ld64 is pretty good. Not sure what the state is on Windows: possibly lld is best?
2. Is dynamic linking as above. This seems to be faster even though the dynamic links need to resolved at runtime. I presume because at least the links wholly within the dynlib don't need to be resolved.
I find it sad that a lot of foundational open-source software is created/maintained by trading/crypto/money laundering companies. But OTOH it's great that they at least contribute _something_ to the society!
Also, Longbridge, who seem to be using this GPUI component library for their Longbridge Pro [1] app, look to me like a regular online brokerage company. What is your issue with that?
Bitcoin ethos (as in, the original 'banks are broken, let's fix this') is kinda similar to the hacker ethos ('this thing/program is broken, let's fix this'), so maybe this shouldn't be too surprising? Short term pain for long term gain etc.
(disclaimer: I think bitcoin is dumb, but the market disagrees)
> (disclaimer: I think bitcoin is dumb, but the market disagrees)
I believe that market is quite controversial. Most people know that bitcoin is a bit dump, but they buy it regardless because they believe they profit from it when they do that as part of larger group. A very interesting social experiment with the mix of market manipulation. It is less about stability, independence or usability of the currency, but more about the opportunity of profit.
I'm interested in how's the battery life while running a thing ilke this. Another thing I'm interested in does it support rendering to texture.. usage being used as a texture on an object (monitor let's say) in a game or rendered as a texture with opacity on a quad/triangle over a screen as a UI layer or a HUD
This is often a problem with Rust UI frameworks, they may look beautiful, but the moment accesibility becomes a requirement, the whole app needs to be scrapped and rewritten in something more mature.
Is this native as in "not web" or native as in actually using native text entry and scrolling widgets? There is quite a huge difference as the Java world discovered.
macOS is the only OS you can write native applications for. On Linux there are with GTK and QT two different GUI frameworks that could be considered native on some distros.
And on Windows there are so many different frameworks and approaches used by MS for the shell that even a Webview could be considered native
Same model as Flutter which is a million times more pleasant to write and mature at this particular use case which I don’t actually think Rust is well suited to generally speaking.
I write both swiftUI and flutter daily. I think SwiftUI is the winner if we're going to put names forward. But arguably, not cross platform. But in terms of language adaptability for UI, Swift is king.
I would say the opposite and it sounds like a personal preference at which point I think lack of cross platform compatibility ceases to anything else other than a major major problem.
Rust's definitely well-suited to writing the low-level infrastructure pieces (the implementations of the renderer, layout, text, etc). You really want something with fast and predicatable performance there. Whether it pans out for writing actual applications we'll have to see, but a lot of big popular applications are written in C++ which is surely less suitable.
Rust certainly needs more GUI component collections. There are lots of GUI toolkits, but a comparatively small number of prebuilt components you can use with any of them.
This collection looks quite useful, though the component list is mostly indistinguishable from a list of components for a web framework. The webview component is the only one that seems somewhat specific to native applications. So for something like a file-open dialog you would still have to pull in something like rfd [1] and lose styling consistency
Even though most UI libraries now draw their own widgets some native integration is almost always used/desired. Those integrations are typically: keyboard short cuts, native system menu (macOS), native file dialogs, and (sometimes) native context menus. I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting, but these minimal integrations are a good thing as they give the user some sense of familiarity.
Not just a sense of familiarity; you will simply never build the full spectrum of a file explorer's functionality in a custom file dialog, that would be a complete waste of engineering time. And many more users than you'd expect benefit from the fact that native file dialogs are actually full-fledged explorers. For example, I fairly often find myself quick-previewing a file to be sure it's the correct one when I select it.
Only the designers of an app, product-owners etc. want their app to "look consistent over platforms".
Your users want the file-dialog, window-chrome, menus etc consistent too. But for them consistent means consistent with the 20+ other applications they use on a daily base. So native.
¹ Obviously some software excepted. E.g. categories like "expert software" like Blender, AutoCAD, Photoshop/CS, where dialogs must a) be optimized for their niche workflow and b) remain consistent for that user when they upgrade their OS or move between OSes. But that's an exception. Your TODO-list app or PDF reader almost certainly is not that.
> Your users want the file-dialog, window-chrome, menus etc consistent too. But for them consistent means consistent with the 20+ other applications they use on a daily base. So native.
I don't think what you posit is true at all, at least not in 2025. Windows itself has abandoned consistency between its native applications, with more custom and modern styling that looks nothing like what you get out of the box with Windows UI frameworks. Almost every piece of software currently running on my computer has custom chrome: the web browser, my VPN, VSCode, Discord, Steam, mouse driver, keyboard driver, laptop fan driver. The only thing that doesn't is qbittorent, and it looks like a complete eyesore. For Linux, there's not even a singular "native UI look" to target.
Maybe it's different in MacOS land, but from my perspective you're 20 years behind if your application is trying to blend in with the OS in any regard other than the corner where the X button is located. That way of thinking went out of fashion decades ago, and good riddance to it because things look much better now.
That showcase application (other than Zed) looks awesome, but the very fancy-looking home page [1] fails to have a one-liner explanation of, uh, what the application does. Please consider fixing.
Although its still very vertically scoped for zed, I'm way more hyped about this UI than iced, dioxus ui, gtk-rs, etc. because of how complete it already is in an early stage.
It seems like trading applications tend to be what demands the performance to push R&D like this for Rust GUI. My team at Kraken worked on https://iced.rs/ which powers https://www.kraken.com/desktop, a very similar application. You can definitely feel the difference in a Rust GUI vs. a web view. It can maintain high frame rates doing so much on the screen at once.
This looks very good from the screenshots. I will try this as quickly as I can. I have been building with egui and have tried Iced, Slint and Makepad.
I built (agentic coded) a stocks viewer app for Indian stock market data: https://github.com/brainless/Indistocks. It was a fantastic experience as to how easily I could build a GUI app.
My main product also uses egui: https://github.com/brainless/nocodo. It used to have a web app frontend and I moved to desktop app after the experiment with Indistocks. The experience has been really good, also coded with agents.
Desktop apps are fun and even on my somewhat old and slow laptop (i5 8th gen, 16 GB RAM, 2GB nvidia dedicated graphics), they are so much faster than web apps on Chrome (on Linux). I want desktop apps to make a big comeback, we could use so many old devices.
I can't speak for GPUI specifically, but in general for Rust UI toolkits I'm seeing about 10-15mb for an O3 build with LTO enabled and when including things like ICU data, a WGPU-based renderer, SVG rendering support, and a "full fat" async HTTP client. More minimal builds with features disabled and/or Os/Oz can bring that down to more like 5mb.
(obviously you can also take things much higher by building more functionality into your application, but that gives you an idea of the kind of "base size" achievable).
> By default, Rust optimizes for execution speed, compilation speed, and ease of debugging rather than binary size, since for the vast majority of applications this is ideal. But for situations where a developer wants to optimize for binary size instead, Rust provides mechanisms to accomplish this.
The simplest examples have over a thousand (literally) dependencies. Amongst them, are GTK, GDK, pango, etc. It literally depends on another toolkit, which is the weirdest thing IMHO.
I think this is pretty common on Linux. You would want to GTK (or Qt) I would think to draw the top level window and perhaps system menus, etc. even though the UI itself is drawn using a GPU canvas.
Are GTK/Qt memory safe now?
This looks to be one of the most complete Rust UI creates (in terms of available widgets/components), but unfortunately has almost no usage (yet). I do see their docs are coming along now. Another very complete one is fyrox-ui used by the fyrox game engine: https://crates.io/crates/fyrox-ui. Again, not really used/known outside of fyrox.
The Rust UI scene is maturing, but the most popular options (iced, egui, dioxus, slint, etc.) aren't even the most complete component-wise atm as far as I can tell.
UPDATE: This honestly looks incredible and makes huge strides in the Rust UI landscape. You can run an impressive widget gallery app here showing all their components:
https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component/tree/main/crate...
Just "cargo run --release"
> The Rust UI scene is maturing, but the most popular options (iced, egui, dioxus, slint, etc.) aren't even the most complete component-wise atm as far as I can tell.
I think part of the issue is that they're still changing so much as we speak. But there's real momentum here and n=1 but I've been able to build incredibly rich, enterprise-ready UI with Rust today.
> I've been able to build incredibly rich, enterprise-ready UI with Rust today.
Which UI crate did you use? The word "enterprise" caught my eye. So far I haven't found a Rust UI crate that I found rich enough, so I'm curious your experience.
I think you'll find two definitions of enterprise ready. People who make UIs and are comparing a UI crate to see how it stacks up, and people who write business logic in rust and only care that they were able to make a gui work without switching to some other language. I would put my org in the second situation. Someone bought the thing and didn't complain so good enough I guess. We were using egui.
Ahh, gotcha. Yeah "enterprise" to me meant: "I can write/maintain a UI rich/polished enough to pass as a 'shrink wrapped' app to my end users".
Thanks for the reply.
FWIW that reply was from a different person :D
In my case I did mean "I can write/maintain a UI rich/polished enough to pass as a 'shrink wrapped'"
The notion of shrink wrapped software dates us I think? But to that end, I have elements of so many different native looks jumbled around in my head all the way back to amiga workbench (deluxe paint was the best), that anything without really obvious flaws like off centered text or unresponsive buttons feels shrinkwrappable to me. By my standard any of these looks is enterprise ready. I remember someone at MS looking at a gui made by a team my friend was on and mocking it for looking like it was out of tron with saturated colors on a black background in high contrast instead of "modern" 3d grey buttons. It looked a lot more like the linked UI than anything MS was producing at the time. So there is the fashion aspect of it. You want to stand out, but not too much. I think that is the aspect I'm unable to judge. If everything is in the first or second place I look, I just won't care.
I used `iced` but admittedly I also used a lot of elbow grease. Custom Theme, custom widgets and lots of passion to get it to look Just Right.
Cool. Any publicly available source code? If not, any screenshots at least? I'm curious as what Iced is capable of (with extra widgets/themes/etc. like you mentioned).
Cosmic is built on iced, so you could look what they achieved.
Since you think the UI scene is maturing: Where do I find 1. design docs and 2. debugging infra docs (Validation, Testing, Stepping, Logging, Tracing, Recording, Scheduling, Reversal Computing as typical ones) and/or how to apply them ?
> UPDATE: This honestly looks incredible and makes huge strides in the Rust UI landscape. You can run an impressive widget gallery app here showing all their components:
> https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component/tree/main/crate...
> Just "cargo run --release"
Very impressive! Only thing I am concerned over is that it uses around 900 dependencies. But I don't know whether it much for GUI applications.
That did seem excessive to me as well. I do worry about the DX of trying to work on an app with this. After each edit, I would expect a solid compile time to simply try your work.
I don't think GPUI has it integrated yet, but Dioxus's Subsecond tool [0] implements binary hot-patching for Rust apps which can help alieviate this problem.
The other thing you can do (which is popular in the Bevy community) is to compiile the "core runtime" into dynamic library. Then you don't need to recompile that set of crates for incremental builds.
[0]: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/dioxus/tree/main/packages/subs...
Even in Dioxus the usefulness is somewhat limited right now though.
(dioxus-7-rc.3)
It usually only works when reordering elements, or changing static values (styles, attributes, etc).
Which, to be fair, does speed things up a lot when tinkering with small details.
But 70%+ or so of my changes still result in recompiles.
> The other thing you can do (which is popular in the Bevy community) is to compile the "core runtime" into dynamic library. Then you don't need to recompile that set of crates for incremental builds.
I'm curious as to what this means exactly. Are you saying keep the UI stuff in a separate crate from rest of app or ???. And just a separate or an actual dynlib? (wouldn't that imply C ABI? would make it a pain to interface with it)
An actual dynlib (containing the core framework crates that typically dont change between compiles (and which in C world might be installed as precompiled system libraries)).
It doesn't necessarily require C ABI. Rust doesn't make any guarantees about stability of the Rust ABI. But if you compile the app and the dynlib with the same compiler version then it works in practice (and IIRC there are enough things relying on this that this is unlikely to break in future).
That does mean you need to recompile the dynlib when you upgrade the compiler, but that is probably infrequent enough not to be a huge issue. Certainly if your aim is fast-recompiles in response to e.g. ui style changes then it ought to work.
--
A note on the sort of Rust compile times I see for a TodoMVC app using my Rust UI framework (412 dependencies):
- A clean release build (-O3) is 1m 01s
- An incremental (-03) rebuild is 1.7s
- A clean debug build (-O0) is 35s
- An incremental debug build (-O0) is 1s
That's on a 2021 MacBook M1 Pro which is fairly fast, but I hear the M4 machines are ~twice as fast. And that's also without any fancy tricks.
I did some quick research. I knew Rust ABI was unstable, but I didn't realize you could create Rust ABI dynlib and Rust would automatically dynamically link it. For intra-app it would work just fine. Neat. Link: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75903098/dynamic-linking...
However, I don't see what advantage this gives. You are going to specify that dependency in your Cargo.toml just like any statically linked crate. Anything that would invalidate the cache for a static crate would invalidate it for a dynamic linked crate. Iow, it seems like separate crates are the magic here, not the linking type. What am I missing?
Thanks for the build stats. Those are helpful. I have an M1 Max currently.
UPDATE: Good points below. As a dynlib it would create a boundary for sure (no LTO, etc.). Worth playing with, thx.
> I don't see what advantage this gives
I believe it may "just" be faster link times. Which may seem minor, but link times can often dominate incremental compile times because it's a slow and (at least historically) serial step which is O(total code size) even if the actual compilation is incremental.
See mold's linking benchmarks: https://github.com/rui314/mold. It can be the difference between multiple 10s of seconds with traditional linkers vs <2s with newers ones.
There are few strategies for dealing with this:
1. Is just to use a faster multi-threaded linker. On Linux, lld, mold, and wild on Linux are all much faster than the traditional ld/gold (and the latter two another step above lld). On macOS, the new built-in ld64 is pretty good. Not sure what the state is on Windows: possibly lld is best?
2. Is dynamic linking as above. This seems to be faster even though the dynamic links need to resolved at runtime. I presume because at least the links wholly within the dynlib don't need to be resolved.
3. Is tools like Subsecond (https://github.com/DioxusLabs/dioxus/tree/main/packages/subs...) which effectively implement incremental linking by diffing the symbols in object files.
I find it sad that a lot of foundational open-source software is created/maintained by trading/crypto/money laundering companies. But OTOH it's great that they at least contribute _something_ to the society!
gpui itself is maintained by the folks at https://zed.dev.
Also, Longbridge, who seem to be using this GPUI component library for their Longbridge Pro [1] app, look to me like a regular online brokerage company. What is your issue with that?
1: https://longbridge.com/desktop/
Bitcoin ethos (as in, the original 'banks are broken, let's fix this') is kinda similar to the hacker ethos ('this thing/program is broken, let's fix this'), so maybe this shouldn't be too surprising? Short term pain for long term gain etc.
(disclaimer: I think bitcoin is dumb, but the market disagrees)
> (disclaimer: I think bitcoin is dumb, but the market disagrees)
I believe that market is quite controversial. Most people know that bitcoin is a bit dump, but they buy it regardless because they believe they profit from it when they do that as part of larger group. A very interesting social experiment with the mix of market manipulation. It is less about stability, independence or usability of the currency, but more about the opportunity of profit.
I doubt that a lot of it is.
Virtualized lists and tables are amazing!
So many UI frameworks don't have these and require building them yourself...
I'm interested in how's the battery life while running a thing ilke this. Another thing I'm interested in does it support rendering to texture.. usage being used as a texture on an object (monitor let's say) in a game or rendered as a texture with opacity on a quad/triangle over a screen as a UI layer or a HUD
Does this implement accessibility at all?
This is often a problem with Rust UI frameworks, they may look beautiful, but the moment accesibility becomes a requirement, the whole app needs to be scrapped and rewritten in something more mature.
Yes
Looks great for those using Rust - however I do wonder how well this works, if at all, under screen readers and other accessible tech?
Haven't tried running the code myself, but their API docs mention accessibility at least: https://longbridge.github.io/gpui-component/docs/components/...
Assuming the docs are correct, the UI controls seem ARIA compliant as long as you bother implementing the necessary descriptions and labels.
my #1 question each time I see a new UI framework
"Let's get the volume first, then worry about accessibility"
That's the typical answer to these questions. Unfortunately, unless you bake it in from day #1 that's not so simple to fix afterwards.
Is this native as in "not web" or native as in actually using native text entry and scrolling widgets? There is quite a huge difference as the Java world discovered.
macOS is the only OS you can write native applications for. On Linux there are with GTK and QT two different GUI frameworks that could be considered native on some distros. And on Windows there are so many different frameworks and approaches used by MS for the shell that even a Webview could be considered native
Pretty sure native as in "not web". AFAIK, everything is drawn using the various GPU APIs (GPUI started with Metal on macOS, for example).
Same model as Flutter which is a million times more pleasant to write and mature at this particular use case which I don’t actually think Rust is well suited to generally speaking.
I write both swiftUI and flutter daily. I think SwiftUI is the winner if we're going to put names forward. But arguably, not cross platform. But in terms of language adaptability for UI, Swift is king.
I would say the opposite and it sounds like a personal preference at which point I think lack of cross platform compatibility ceases to anything else other than a major major problem.
Rust's definitely well-suited to writing the low-level infrastructure pieces (the implementations of the renderer, layout, text, etc). You really want something with fast and predicatable performance there. Whether it pans out for writing actual applications we'll have to see, but a lot of big popular applications are written in C++ which is surely less suitable.
I think it's native as in "native executable".
GPUI is not "native OS widgets".
Native as in "not web". No OS integration.
Rust certainly needs more GUI component collections. There are lots of GUI toolkits, but a comparatively small number of prebuilt components you can use with any of them.
This collection looks quite useful, though the component list is mostly indistinguishable from a list of components for a web framework. The webview component is the only one that seems somewhat specific to native applications. So for something like a file-open dialog you would still have to pull in something like rfd [1] and lose styling consistency
1: https://docs.rs/rfd/latest/rfd/
Even though most UI libraries now draw their own widgets some native integration is almost always used/desired. Those integrations are typically: keyboard short cuts, native system menu (macOS), native file dialogs, and (sometimes) native context menus. I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting, but these minimal integrations are a good thing as they give the user some sense of familiarity.
Not just a sense of familiarity; you will simply never build the full spectrum of a file explorer's functionality in a custom file dialog, that would be a complete waste of engineering time. And many more users than you'd expect benefit from the fact that native file dialogs are actually full-fledged explorers. For example, I fairly often find myself quick-previewing a file to be sure it's the correct one when I select it.
You should always use the native file picker and not shipping your own. That’s a good thing.
> lose styling consistency
Yes. And that is (almost always¹) a good thing.
Only the designers of an app, product-owners etc. want their app to "look consistent over platforms".
Your users want the file-dialog, window-chrome, menus etc consistent too. But for them consistent means consistent with the 20+ other applications they use on a daily base. So native.
¹ Obviously some software excepted. E.g. categories like "expert software" like Blender, AutoCAD, Photoshop/CS, where dialogs must a) be optimized for their niche workflow and b) remain consistent for that user when they upgrade their OS or move between OSes. But that's an exception. Your TODO-list app or PDF reader almost certainly is not that.
> Your users want the file-dialog, window-chrome, menus etc consistent too. But for them consistent means consistent with the 20+ other applications they use on a daily base. So native.
I don't think what you posit is true at all, at least not in 2025. Windows itself has abandoned consistency between its native applications, with more custom and modern styling that looks nothing like what you get out of the box with Windows UI frameworks. Almost every piece of software currently running on my computer has custom chrome: the web browser, my VPN, VSCode, Discord, Steam, mouse driver, keyboard driver, laptop fan driver. The only thing that doesn't is qbittorent, and it looks like a complete eyesore. For Linux, there's not even a singular "native UI look" to target.
Maybe it's different in MacOS land, but from my perspective you're 20 years behind if your application is trying to blend in with the OS in any regard other than the corner where the X button is located. That way of thinking went out of fashion decades ago, and good riddance to it because things look much better now.
Emacs, which still uses CUI-incompatible keybindings and even key names from a keyboard that hasn't been made since the 01980s.
Videogames.
Excel still supports MS-DOS Lotus 1-2-3 "/" commands, although it certainly doesn't look like Lotus for MS-DOS.
Basically any software people care about is an exception to your rule.
That showcase application (other than Zed) looks awesome, but the very fancy-looking home page [1] fails to have a one-liner explanation of, uh, what the application does. Please consider fixing.
[1]: https://longbridge.com/desktop/
I guess they expect that most people come there from the top level domain. (https://longbridge.com)
Although its still very vertically scoped for zed, I'm way more hyped about this UI than iced, dioxus ui, gtk-rs, etc. because of how complete it already is in an early stage.
Then again I love zed so I might be biased.
2 hours after it's posted on HN, the repo has its first "readme.md typo fix" commit.
GPUI and GPUi components are the two things I'm watching very closely while evaluating truly native GUI development.
Still waiting to see more general use before attempting to port my Svelte UI for a Tauri application but it honestly looks incredible.
Big ups to the guy(s) at Longbridge.
It seems like trading applications tend to be what demands the performance to push R&D like this for Rust GUI. My team at Kraken worked on https://iced.rs/ which powers https://www.kraken.com/desktop, a very similar application. You can definitely feel the difference in a Rust GUI vs. a web view. It can maintain high frame rates doing so much on the screen at once.
This looks very good from the screenshots. I will try this as quickly as I can. I have been building with egui and have tried Iced, Slint and Makepad.
I built (agentic coded) a stocks viewer app for Indian stock market data: https://github.com/brainless/Indistocks. It was a fantastic experience as to how easily I could build a GUI app.
My main product also uses egui: https://github.com/brainless/nocodo. It used to have a web app frontend and I moved to desktop app after the experiment with Indistocks. The experience has been really good, also coded with agents.
Desktop apps are fun and even on my somewhat old and slow laptop (i5 8th gen, 16 GB RAM, 2GB nvidia dedicated graphics), they are so much faster than web apps on Chrome (on Linux). I want desktop apps to make a big comeback, we could use so many old devices.
I was expecting something ugly but these actually look beautiful!
very nice ! what about tauri versus this compoments ?
Hola, finally a good rust ui framework that's not dependent on web
Why is the average binary size 10MB? Does it embed ICU data?
I can't speak for GPUI specifically, but in general for Rust UI toolkits I'm seeing about 10-15mb for an O3 build with LTO enabled and when including things like ICU data, a WGPU-based renderer, SVG rendering support, and a "full fat" async HTTP client. More minimal builds with features disabled and/or Os/Oz can bring that down to more like 5mb.
(obviously you can also take things much higher by building more functionality into your application, but that gives you an idea of the kind of "base size" achievable).
> By default, Rust optimizes for execution speed, compilation speed, and ease of debugging rather than binary size, since for the vast majority of applications this is ideal. But for situations where a developer wants to optimize for binary size instead, Rust provides mechanisms to accomplish this.
https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust?tab=readme-ov-f...