Throwing in my vote... I've been doing everything with wasm-bindgen/web-sys, i.e. just doing my UIs in html, and for 99% that's what I'd want anyways. Web UIs are portable, remotely accessible, and don't require installation on each client.
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...
But for desktop applications it is bloated, a big attack surface.
HTML/CSS is made for online documents, and using it for applications is a bit hack that happen to work, but hides a huge ton of complexity behind frameworks and frameworks of frameworks with leaky abstractions and each their own caveat.
I also have a horse in this race, would love to have it included!
I'm building Hypen (https://hypen.space), a UI framework with a DSL that works in in Rust, TS, Go, Kotlin, Swift, and all over the place, as long as you can use WASM or binaries.
Some cool things about it:
- Renders natively on Desktop, Web (DOM and Canvas), Android and iOS.
- Streaming-first (SSR), so you can stream native apps from the server
- Custom tailwind parser so it supports your favorite shorthands
- Support for streaming apps from CF workers with 5 lines of JS/TS
- You can embed any Hypen app into another Hypen app like its an iframe, with just 1 line of code
- Has a custom "browser" for Hypen apps, both on desktop and on mobile, so you can easily check how your app looks anywhere
- Coming soon - stdlib and WASI interface to enable full WASM portability across platforms
Note: Desktop support is still a bit early and needs more crossplatform testing
I started building this years ago, first manually, now accelerating it with LLM's which are incredible for mindnumbing tasks like writing frameworks like these requires. Its still in an "early alpha" but it's getting closer to maturity and a "stable beta" by the day, hopefully fully stable 1.0 by end of the year.
I like your vision for Hypen and I sincerely hope that you can avoid the faith of every project that tried it before you! (all the toolkits that started as declarative, with clear logic/ui separation, eventually and inevitably add scripting and reinvent js/html).
That made me chuckle though:
Accessibility and i18n tooling:
This is in the plan - accessibility should be the easier one, with i18n tooling coming as more "platform calls" support comes online.
In my experience accessibility is far more difficult to get right, but maybe I've just been unlucky. :)
I’m not well-versed in Rust, but as far as I’m aware there’s a somewhat low hard cap on how ergonomic a fully Rust “old style” imperative OO UI framework (like AppKit/UIKit) can be, which is unfortunate as I find that style easiest to work with for complex desktop apps.
I wish there were more memory safe compiled languages that focused on ergonomics for cases like this.
In my experience declarative UI frameworks quickly get awkward as UI complexity ramps. That model is workable for things like simpler mobile apps, text editors, terminals, and tiny focused utilities but is cumbersome for anything much more involved.
While imperative retain mode frameworks are technically possible in Rust, my understanding is that there’s a level of unavoidable ceremony and syntax ugliness (unless safety is discarded, which defeats the point of using Rust).
I’ve been really impressed with GPUI, particularly with Longbridge’s open source component library which provides a bunch of shadcdn-alike widgets that are really well implemented and come with a bunch of tailwind-like helper functions that make layout easy.
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.
This is great. In recent years the Rust has been talked about so much in regards to the web
. It us getting better and more technologies are being developed tk further this. I am very impressed in what im seeing now. There are some amazing techniques.
For me it's not so much laziness, as more of a lack of desire to rely on a framework that Zed core team still feels to be not ready for a general release. Electron just happens to be the least worst way to make an aesthetically pleasing cross-platform desktop app, but the performance trade-off is a major pain point.
GPUI getting the public release greenlight will no doubt be a turning point for desktop GUI development. All it took is a small team of gifted developers to dogfood their own GUI toolkit and get some much-needed VC backing. The future looks very bright.
I made side-by-side comparison with this and egui. Equi win with the less amount of code required for most things. But GPUI must be excellent for bigger projects where you need better architecture for components.
Can certainly be a downside. Jaded / grumpy rust programmer perspective: I will take this over the typical rust pattern of OSS libs which have been made without being tested in practical applications!
I’ve been using GPUI in a side project of mine (TukeySheets.com) and can attest that it is quite nice and it works well on all platforms, at least in my experience. So I would say, definitely “we are gui” in rust.
The component library by long bridge is also well done and reasonably well documented.
#1 thing helping me with GUI Rust is sccache for crate compilation caching. and #2 is building independent-compilable subcrates. This improves build times by 10x.
Also shoutout to ratatui because even though it's technically a TUI not GUI, it's superb.
EGUI slaps. I'm interested in comparing it with GPUI too: That one gets immediate cred for being demonstrated in a responsive program that demonstrates the range of its complexity.
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!
The wgpu/winit/egui churn is a headache. It's worse if you're doing 3D work. Too many crates want to own the event loop. "We're a framework now!"
I'm dreading the "upgrade" from wgpu 24 to wgpu 29. I stayed with wgpu 24 for a year so I could get work done. Now I have to fix three programs and all their tests and examples.
> It is when winnit or WGPU etc make big breaking changes (Often from accumulation over time) where things get hairy!
Winit has had so much churn over time, I hope they settle down at some point.
I can pretty much guarantee that if I try to build a project from 3+ years ago, the old version of winit will not compile on my Mac, and the new version of winit will have a completely different API surface.
I realize it's not a pure-Rust UI, but building with Tauri has been a joy. I recently built a GUI for one of my side projects and being able to use standard Typescript client-side development approaches, with a locked-down IPC, was surprisingly smooth. Love the "Wails-style" approach to a smaller release size than Electron as well.
It's nice to be able to use existing design systems and components, and to be able to validate in a web browser in quicker build loops before doing the full Tauri builds. I still manually QA across platforms pretty aggressively but Tauri's "cross-platform from day one" really isn't much of a stretch. The project if curious: https://github.com/zecrocks/zkv
Is it common for the toolkits written from scratch in Rust to have bindings for other languages?
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.
Slint UI does have bindings in other languages, but tutorials and docs are still lacking. Qt Bridges is a new option on the way for leveraging Qt with Rust and other language bindings.
Tons of great options, for sure, but community efforts and corporate sponsorship ends up fragmented if there isn’t a clear winner.
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?
I'm excited for Dioxus which is making their own HTML and CSS renderer and has its own independent browser called Blitz, so that's good for competition in the space.
This isn’t Rust-specific, but I’m always slightly surprised I don’t see more people talk about Pangui (https://www.pangui.io/) (it not being out yet is a pretty good reason I guess). If the demos on the site aren’t vaporware, it seems to me like a really promising addition to the current options for desktop gui dev.
The answer to the question posed in the site's domain name is "no", unfortunately.
It looks like it just grabbed the intro to each project's self-description, but blurbs like "Zero-cost ultra-high-performance declarative DOM library using FRP signals" would be worth very little even with screenshots.
“No” is a straightforward answer to “areweguiyet” in Rust. Many well intentioned and well-invested projects with no winning GUIs means we’re not there yet.
Saying “maybe” or “yes” privileges the
activity and hype around Rust GUI over actual results. Bevy is the ironic example: a game engine that produces more discussion and code than, so far, one notable & good game.
Yes, I think it's trying to be comprehensive (as far as possible) rather than detailed. Given the amount of frameworks listed, including representative screenshots or comparisons for each would be a substantial effort.
Is that actually needed? Styling is largely a user decision. They might have defaults yes, but if you looked at a raw HTML page with no CSS styling, you might come to the conclusion that websites have an ugly GUI...
That's why developers have UI/UX and design experts assigned to them. That's why Figma exists. CSS was an attempt to not have to deal with styling. It failed, and landed in the other direction.
When I was a student I had to make quite a few Qt application with C++ (for Linux). However, I bring the food on the table doing web (recently only the backend). During that time, the languages for web were something like Python - concise, convenient in terms of ecosystem and distribution, but bloated in terms of memory consumption. "Hello World in Java almost doesn't hang" he-he. Anyway, my first thought when I found Rust I dreamed to make a GUI application.
Unfortunately, I had the expectation that it should be as simple as making an HTML page. My failure to find a library or a framework to make GUI application made me learn a lot about how GUI works. I realized that making GUI for browser and for desktop are quite different problems. Browser makes easy what's difficult having a desktop oriented GUI framework - text rendering. However, the situation is fair the other around. GUI framework makes easy what's difficult in a browser - drawing arbitrary shapes. As a result, a web-frontend programmer struggles to figure out how to write some text having something like Qt, a GUI programmer tries to find the API to the bitmap in a browser.
It's fair noticed in the previous comments that a GUI framework brings a lot. That's because the problem is complex:
1. Create a window
2. Communicate with the window compositor (you do in WinAPI too btw). How to access the system tray and the child window.
3. Communicate with the operating system.
4. Handle the user input. Callback vs event streams. The user has 4 keyboards for some reason.
5. Rendering. Subpixels, shapes, different DPI. The user has 6 monitors.
6. Text rendering.
7. Widgets. Where probably the most difficult part is to make a textbox, because it involves the solutions of all previous steps.
The steps above touch only the visual part. There's also audio, accessibility, somebody wants the GUI framework to solve the networking.
After all of this research, I picked simply SDL for my project.
1. It's easy to compile.
2. It's small.
3. It relies on the subjectively common dependencies.
4. It's fairly straightforward to upgrade. Given that, you have to create a lot from scratch the part with updating is smaller comparing to a Qt-based solution.
5. It has batteries. My favorite is SDL_ttf which allowed me recently to implement selection of the text which is quite a bit through towards a textbox.
Having a project on SDL requires a lot of knowledge, but not a lot of code.
I am heavily invested in Iced. I feel it's a good framework. On a number of occasions it forced me to rethink how to structure my program to match Iced's model. I find the framework very performant and the resulting program easy to prototype and expand upon. I don't do any web development at all, but if I had to, I'd check out Elm, knowing that Iced is inspired by it.
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
Downsides include:
- 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)
The best approach has been to host a tokio server, and then make a traditional os-native user interface like a full-stack chump.
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)
As a "batteries included" framework Qt is undoubtably amazing but I used it on a project recently and it struck me as dated compared to Flutter or React Native. Maybe I'm doing it wrong but I had to write a lot of boilerplate C++ even when using QML. The layout engine feels byzantine. The state management is mostly manual. Flutter is a lot more consistent, reactive, and all done in one way (Dart) and it supports hot reload natively. It was a more pleasant experience overall.
And React has that "web development" ecosystem taint... I'd definitely lean towards Flutter in this case. It's neat, tidy and a contained ecosystem. It may not be fully perfect, but for cross platform UI's I think it's the way to go.
My only question is - say if one uses Rust, is flutter_rust_bridge the way to go?
Ah, I love rustdesk. I didn't know it was Flutter based. Only minor complaint about Rustdesk is that when you send the official link to people, they are frightened by a big scary "Scammer" alert[1]. To you and me, we immediately understand its actual purpose, but to non technical folks they hesitate to click it. I've seen this too many times.
Qt has been going strong for 2+ decades and you can bet will do so for at least that many more. Flutter is by Google and it exists when I started writing this comment but we can't say for sure it will when I'm done writing it
I'm a bit out of the loop but I checked out the GitHub repo [0] and while the authors moved onto Slint the crate is still actively maintained. That said I also looked at the latest commits and that threw me down a rabbit hole of finding out that the main maintainer has a blog where he wrote about using Sailfish OS as a daily driver [1] and imagine my surprise when he revealed that he actually co-maintains a Signal client app for SailfishOS too. I looked into the GitLab repo for that app [2] and I gleefully discovered that it's mostly written in Rust, the Cargo.toml contains a dependency to qmetaobject-rs too.
All that is to say that I'm glad there's another way to get Rust on mobile aside from stuff like flutter_rust_bridge.
i've recently built a very complex healthcare application in dioxus and it's been a tremendous joy to work with. right now it's web-only, but the app does run fine as a desktop app when we need it.
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.
> 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.
Qt QML is already annoying in C++ since you have to juggle 2 lifetime systems, c++ manual lifetime management and QMLs QML engine (aka gargabe collection).
> egui is the clear winner for making desktop applications
I disagree. It's the easiest to get started with, but it looks pretty terrible (poor font rendering especially), and immediate mode has serious downsides.
Throwing in my vote... I've been doing everything with wasm-bindgen/web-sys, i.e. just doing my UIs in html, and for 99% that's what I'd want anyways. Web UIs are portable, remotely accessible, and don't require installation on each client.
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 )
Web UI is fine for web applications, obviously.
But for desktop applications it is bloated, a big attack surface.
HTML/CSS is made for online documents, and using it for applications is a bit hack that happen to work, but hides a huge ton of complexity behind frameworks and frameworks of frameworks with leaky abstractions and each their own caveat.
> a big attack surface
Wdym? At least web apps are sandboxed by default in contrast to native.
web UI is slow, this is only reason when I don't it.
saving this comment, this echos my own thinking, html is not great but its better than dealing with all those things you listed.
Second this. Html is just so darn universal now
I also have a horse in this race, would love to have it included!
I'm building Hypen (https://hypen.space), a UI framework with a DSL that works in in Rust, TS, Go, Kotlin, Swift, and all over the place, as long as you can use WASM or binaries.
Some cool things about it:
- Renders natively on Desktop, Web (DOM and Canvas), Android and iOS.
- Streaming-first (SSR), so you can stream native apps from the server
- Custom tailwind parser so it supports your favorite shorthands
- Support for streaming apps from CF workers with 5 lines of JS/TS
- You can embed any Hypen app into another Hypen app like its an iframe, with just 1 line of code
- Has a custom "browser" for Hypen apps, both on desktop and on mobile, so you can easily check how your app looks anywhere
- Coming soon - stdlib and WASI interface to enable full WASM portability across platforms
Note: Desktop support is still a bit early and needs more crossplatform testing
I started building this years ago, first manually, now accelerating it with LLM's which are incredible for mindnumbing tasks like writing frameworks like these requires. Its still in an "early alpha" but it's getting closer to maturity and a "stable beta" by the day, hopefully fully stable 1.0 by end of the year.
I like your vision for Hypen and I sincerely hope that you can avoid the faith of every project that tried it before you! (all the toolkits that started as declarative, with clear logic/ui separation, eventually and inevitably add scripting and reinvent js/html).
That made me chuckle though:
In my experience accessibility is far more difficult to get right, but maybe I've just been unlucky. :)Accessibility is also difficult to add retroactively. You should consider it from the start, not simply add it to a plan!
Just make a PR here: https://github.com/areweguiyet/areweguiyet
(I'm not affiliated, but have made PRs there in the past)
Building a GUI framework in Rust comes with certain challenges.
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...
Thanks for that link. I just like the idea of creating things with Rust. Having the ability to build things for the web with Rust is a plus
I also wanted to shout out https://ratatui.rs/.
Most of the time, I just want some UI. And TUI's are easier / more portable than GUI's.
I’m not well-versed in Rust, but as far as I’m aware there’s a somewhat low hard cap on how ergonomic a fully Rust “old style” imperative OO UI framework (like AppKit/UIKit) can be, which is unfortunate as I find that style easiest to work with for complex desktop apps.
I wish there were more memory safe compiled languages that focused on ergonomics for cases like this.
Rust doesn't play well with traditional frameworks but works fairly well with Elm and immediate mode.
One of the reasons I started messing around with Zig.
What makes you say that exactly?
In my experience declarative UI frameworks quickly get awkward as UI complexity ramps. That model is workable for things like simpler mobile apps, text editors, terminals, and tiny focused utilities but is cumbersome for anything much more involved.
While imperative retain mode frameworks are technically possible in Rust, my understanding is that there’s a level of unavoidable ceremony and syntax ugliness (unless safety is discarded, which defeats the point of using Rust).
I’ve been really impressed with GPUI, particularly with Longbridge’s open source component library which provides a bunch of shadcdn-alike widgets that are really well implemented and come with a bunch of tailwind-like helper functions that make layout easy.
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.
This is great. In recent years the Rust has been talked about so much in regards to the web . It us getting better and more technologies are being developed tk further this. I am very impressed in what im seeing now. There are some amazing techniques.
For me it's not so much laziness, as more of a lack of desire to rely on a framework that Zed core team still feels to be not ready for a general release. Electron just happens to be the least worst way to make an aesthetically pleasing cross-platform desktop app, but the performance trade-off is a major pain point.
GPUI getting the public release greenlight will no doubt be a turning point for desktop GUI development. All it took is a small team of gifted developers to dogfood their own GUI toolkit and get some much-needed VC backing. The future looks very bright.
GPUI is truly awesome.
Check out: https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component
I made side-by-side comparison with this and egui. Equi win with the less amount of code required for most things. But GPUI must be excellent for bigger projects where you need better architecture for components.
GPUI is developed alongside Zed and thus features that aren't useful for Zed are sometimes left behind.
I think there was a community fork recently that tried to tend to these concerns.
It's not a bad thing per se, but its worth mentioning.
Can certainly be a downside. Jaded / grumpy rust programmer perspective: I will take this over the typical rust pattern of OSS libs which have been made without being tested in practical applications!
I’ve been using GPUI in a side project of mine (TukeySheets.com) and can attest that it is quite nice and it works well on all platforms, at least in my experience. So I would say, definitely “we are gui” in rust.
The component library by long bridge is also well done and reasonably well documented.
That looks very nice. How much of the UI is effectively stock gpui-component vs custom components? The charts? I assume you did custom theming?
#1 thing helping me with GUI Rust is sccache for crate compilation caching. and #2 is building independent-compilable subcrates. This improves build times by 10x.
Also shoutout to ratatui because even though it's technically a TUI not GUI, it's superb.
EGUI slaps. I'm interested in comparing it with GPUI too: That one gets immediate cred for being demonstrated in a responsive program that demonstrates the range of its complexity.
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!
The wgpu/winit/egui churn is a headache. It's worse if you're doing 3D work. Too many crates want to own the event loop. "We're a framework now!"
I'm dreading the "upgrade" from wgpu 24 to wgpu 29. I stayed with wgpu 24 for a year so I could get work done. Now I have to fix three programs and all their tests and examples.
> It is when winnit or WGPU etc make big breaking changes (Often from accumulation over time) where things get hairy!
Winit has had so much churn over time, I hope they settle down at some point.
I can pretty much guarantee that if I try to build a project from 3+ years ago, the old version of winit will not compile on my Mac, and the new version of winit will have a completely different API surface.
Wait until you try Device Events on certain newer Linux versions. You might be in for a surprise, of which is no fault of Winit.
le sigh
I realize it's not a pure-Rust UI, but building with Tauri has been a joy. I recently built a GUI for one of my side projects and being able to use standard Typescript client-side development approaches, with a locked-down IPC, was surprisingly smooth. Love the "Wails-style" approach to a smaller release size than Electron as well.
It's nice to be able to use existing design systems and components, and to be able to validate in a web browser in quicker build loops before doing the full Tauri builds. I still manually QA across platforms pretty aggressively but Tauri's "cross-platform from day one" really isn't much of a stretch. The project if curious: https://github.com/zecrocks/zkv
Is it common for the toolkits written from scratch in Rust to have bindings for other languages?
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.
Slint UI does have bindings in other languages, but tutorials and docs are still lacking. Qt Bridges is a new option on the way for leveraging Qt with Rust and other language bindings.
Link: https://www.qt.io/development/qt-framework/qt-bridges
Qt already has really good binding, see Pyside6 for instance. GTK similarly through introspection.
Not sure why you want to build desktop GUIs using web tech though.
While part of the Windows crate, I think windows-reactor deserves explicit mention.
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.
Docs: https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs/blob/master/docs/rea...
I would give a look to the creators of SpacetimeDB and their game that they've developed. Some of their work utilizing Rust was interesting.
To extend this, what's the state of accessibility for user interfaces built in Rust?
The main frameworks with traction like Slint UI, egui, tauri, and Dioxus all have baseline accessibility support
Many libraries now support AccessKit.
egui has native accesskit support
Tons of great options, for sure, but community efforts and corporate sponsorship ends up fragmented if there isn’t a clear winner.
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?
I'm excited for Dioxus which is making their own HTML and CSS renderer and has its own independent browser called Blitz, so that's good for competition in the space.
Which of these has effective accessibility support?
I suspect if such a filter was applied there would be very few. Probably just the bindings to gtk, qt or appkit.
I think this article: https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-... was the most exhaustive review of accessibility that I know of.
Nice! Thank you.
Yes please add accessibility support as a filter.
This isn’t Rust-specific, but I’m always slightly surprised I don’t see more people talk about Pangui (https://www.pangui.io/) (it not being out yet is a pretty good reason I guess). If the demos on the site aren’t vaporware, it seems to me like a really promising addition to the current options for desktop gui dev.
Looks pretty neat. I'm a little disappointed about a closed beta though.
I tried to find a ELM style framework in Rust. And I couldn't find it in Rust and chose F# Fabulous instead.
Uhhh.. for a page thats about GUIs, this seems awfully sparse for the actual look and feel of said GUIs.
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.
The answer to the question posed in the site's domain name is "no", unfortunately.
It looks like it just grabbed the intro to each project's self-description, but blurbs like "Zero-cost ultra-high-performance declarative DOM library using FRP signals" would be worth very little even with screenshots.
"no" is reductive to the point of being misleading.
Cosmic DE is built using iced which is a rust gui library. As far as native, single-platform guis go, I'd say rust is plenty mature.
There's also Bevy, a rust game engine, which, if I'm not mistaken is built on egui(?), and I think supports multiple compile targets.
Between a desktop environment and a game engine, I'd say rust is in a pretty decent place when it comes to gui.
“No” is a straightforward answer to “areweguiyet” in Rust. Many well intentioned and well-invested projects with no winning GUIs means we’re not there yet.
Saying “maybe” or “yes” privileges the activity and hype around Rust GUI over actual results. Bevy is the ironic example: a game engine that produces more discussion and code than, so far, one notable & good game.
> There's also Bevy, a rust game engine, which, if I'm not mistaken is built on egui(?)
Not entirely correct, they have bevy_ui as the in-house example but many people use the third party bevy_egui crate
Yes, I think it's trying to be comprehensive (as far as possible) rather than detailed. Given the amount of frameworks listed, including representative screenshots or comparisons for each would be a substantial effort.
The best primer on the current(ish) state of GUI programming in Rust, IMO, is this article from 2025 which is linked on that page: https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-...
Almost all the screenshots in this article are “hello world”…
Opening that site prompts my browser to download a `Human_fart.wav` file.
Seems like a referrer of HN triggers that. Copy & paste the URL and it works fine. Idiotic.
Seems like it.
> Idiotic.
Yes, seeing how simple it seems to redirect to a page playing the sound, instead. ;)
Is that actually needed? Styling is largely a user decision. They might have defaults yes, but if you looked at a raw HTML page with no CSS styling, you might come to the conclusion that websites have an ugly GUI...
It absolutely is. Defaults matter, most developers just want a GUI for their app that doesn't look like ass. Almost no one wants to mess with styling.
That's why developers have UI/UX and design experts assigned to them. That's why Figma exists. CSS was an attempt to not have to deal with styling. It failed, and landed in the other direction.
> That's why developers have UI/UX and design experts assigned to them.
Not everybody works in big tech.
This is the mindset that gives you Java-Style GUIs.
I love Java-style GUIs though.
Perhaps it's to show how fragmented the community is.
When I was a student I had to make quite a few Qt application with C++ (for Linux). However, I bring the food on the table doing web (recently only the backend). During that time, the languages for web were something like Python - concise, convenient in terms of ecosystem and distribution, but bloated in terms of memory consumption. "Hello World in Java almost doesn't hang" he-he. Anyway, my first thought when I found Rust I dreamed to make a GUI application.
Unfortunately, I had the expectation that it should be as simple as making an HTML page. My failure to find a library or a framework to make GUI application made me learn a lot about how GUI works. I realized that making GUI for browser and for desktop are quite different problems. Browser makes easy what's difficult having a desktop oriented GUI framework - text rendering. However, the situation is fair the other around. GUI framework makes easy what's difficult in a browser - drawing arbitrary shapes. As a result, a web-frontend programmer struggles to figure out how to write some text having something like Qt, a GUI programmer tries to find the API to the bitmap in a browser.
It's fair noticed in the previous comments that a GUI framework brings a lot. That's because the problem is complex:
1. Create a window
2. Communicate with the window compositor (you do in WinAPI too btw). How to access the system tray and the child window.
3. Communicate with the operating system.
4. Handle the user input. Callback vs event streams. The user has 4 keyboards for some reason.
5. Rendering. Subpixels, shapes, different DPI. The user has 6 monitors.
6. Text rendering.
7. Widgets. Where probably the most difficult part is to make a textbox, because it involves the solutions of all previous steps.
The steps above touch only the visual part. There's also audio, accessibility, somebody wants the GUI framework to solve the networking.
After all of this research, I picked simply SDL for my project.
1. It's easy to compile.
2. It's small.
3. It relies on the subjectively common dependencies.
4. It's fairly straightforward to upgrade. Given that, you have to create a lot from scratch the part with updating is smaller comparing to a Qt-based solution.
5. It has batteries. My favorite is SDL_ttf which allowed me recently to implement selection of the text which is quite a bit through towards a textbox.
Having a project on SDL requires a lot of knowledge, but not a lot of code.
As the joke goes, there are more GUI frameworks (game engines) for Rust than apps (games) written in them.
I’ve really enjoyed and leaned into building desktop apps with GPUI in the last months. Vibe engineered my apps but feel snappy and fast
I am heavily invested in Iced. I feel it's a good framework. On a number of occasions it forced me to rethink how to structure my program to match Iced's model. I find the framework very performant and the resulting program easy to prototype and expand upon. I don't do any web development at all, but if I had to, I'd check out Elm, knowing that Iced is inspired by it.
Strengths:
Downsides include:why not stay true to rust thinking and just use a TUI? Binding to a heavy not rust ecosystem requires many runsave calls.
Possibly stupid question: if we are OK with using Arc everywhere in the UI (UIKit style), does that help?
Interested in Azul Gui, design frontend generate code for different languages !
The best approach has been to host a tokio server, and then make a traditional os-native user interface like a full-stack chump.
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)
qmetaobject-rs gives you the best of both worlds: logic in rust, UI in arguably world's best cross platform framework Qt.
As a "batteries included" framework Qt is undoubtably amazing but I used it on a project recently and it struck me as dated compared to Flutter or React Native. Maybe I'm doing it wrong but I had to write a lot of boilerplate C++ even when using QML. The layout engine feels byzantine. The state management is mostly manual. Flutter is a lot more consistent, reactive, and all done in one way (Dart) and it supports hot reload natively. It was a more pleasant experience overall.
And React has that "web development" ecosystem taint... I'd definitely lean towards Flutter in this case. It's neat, tidy and a contained ecosystem. It may not be fully perfect, but for cross platform UI's I think it's the way to go.
My only question is - say if one uses Rust, is flutter_rust_bridge the way to go?
flutter_rust_bridge is what rustdesk uses with pretty good success, it's where I first discovered it.
Ah, I love rustdesk. I didn't know it was Flutter based. Only minor complaint about Rustdesk is that when you send the official link to people, they are frightened by a big scary "Scammer" alert[1]. To you and me, we immediately understand its actual purpose, but to non technical folks they hesitate to click it. I've seen this too many times.
[1] https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/releases
Qt has been going strong for 2+ decades and you can bet will do so for at least that many more. Flutter is by Google and it exists when I started writing this comment but we can't say for sure it will when I'm done writing it
I'm a bit out of the loop but I checked out the GitHub repo [0] and while the authors moved onto Slint the crate is still actively maintained. That said I also looked at the latest commits and that threw me down a rabbit hole of finding out that the main maintainer has a blog where he wrote about using Sailfish OS as a daily driver [1] and imagine my surprise when he revealed that he actually co-maintains a Signal client app for SailfishOS too. I looked into the GitLab repo for that app [2] and I gleefully discovered that it's mostly written in Rust, the Cargo.toml contains a dependency to qmetaobject-rs too.
All that is to say that I'm glad there's another way to get Rust on mobile aside from stuff like flutter_rust_bridge.
[0] https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs
[1] https://www.rubdos.be/2026/04/17/my-sailfish-os-journey-apps...
[2] https://gitlab.com/whisperfish/whisperfish
i've recently built a very complex healthcare application in dioxus and it's been a tremendous joy to work with. right now it's web-only, but the app does run fine as a desktop app when we need it.
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.
I would love to see this @octernion. Im very interested in health care apps.
What components were lacking? Is what you've built accessible somewhere?
my 2 cents:
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.
No immediate mode GUI framework can be considered a clear winner for desktop applications usage.
egui is, however, one of the most reliable paths in Rust today for building and shipping a desktop app.
> 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.
Qt QML is already annoying in C++ since you have to juggle 2 lifetime systems, c++ manual lifetime management and QMLs QML engine (aka gargabe collection).
Did immediate mode guis solve (in)accessibility problem they used to be really bad at?
> egui is the clear winner for making desktop applications
I disagree. It's the easiest to get started with, but it looks pretty terrible (poor font rendering especially), and immediate mode has serious downsides.
My current favourite is https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component
egui has recently revamped text rendering, looks much better than it did just a few months ago.