boringcactus

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-gui-librar…

The GUI situation in Rust is dreadful: https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-gui-librar… Rust is simply not meant for GUI-based data design but I still want Qt in Rust. That's it. Not QML or Slint or egui or Tauri or gpui or Iced. No markup at all. None of the immediate mode things. No double and triple languages like this C++ mess. Definitely not GTK or the other non-imperative subpar things. There is one option. Until there is more than one, Qt is the best. No one else is worried about this missed opportunity.

Here are two real-world examples of using Rhai: https://glicol.org/tour#meta1 https://glicol.org/tour#meta2 I've embedded Rhai in Glicol to support sample-level audio synthesis, and the performance is [acceptable]. Real-time audio is very computationally intensive, after all. I've tried various embedded scripting languages in Rust, but Rhai probably has the best documentation and playground. For reference, see this survey: https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/09/16/survey-of-rust-embeddable-scri… Recent Koto Lang also looks promising: https://koto.dev/

This from Melody Horn back in 2020 is a great companion piece to this. https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.html https://web.archive.org/web/20231215222059/https://www.boringcactus.co… They both echoed that we need to be prepared for such environment and they have some good points.

https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-gui-librar… I started writing a program that needed to have a table with 1 million rows. This means it needs to be virtualised. Pretty common in GUI libraries. The only Rust GUI library I found that could do this easily was gpui-component (https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component). It also renders text crisply (rules out egui), looks nice with the default style (rules out GTK, FLTK, etc.), isn't web-based (rules out Dioxus), was pretty easy to use and the developers were very responsive. Definitely the best option today (I would say it's probably the first option that I haven't hated in some way). The only other reasonable choices I would say are: * egui - doesn't render very nicely and some of the APIs are amateurish, but it's quick and it works. Good option for simple tools. * Iced - looks nice and seemed to work fairly well. No virtualised lists though. * Slint (though in some ways it is weird and it requires quite a lot of boilerplate setup). All the others will cause you pain in some way. I think the "ones to watch" are: * Makepad - from the demos I've seen this looks really cool, especially for arty GUI projects like synthesizers and car UIs. However it has basically no documentation so don't bother yet. * Xilem - this is an attempt to make an 100% perfect Rust GUI library, which is cool and all but I imagine it also will never be finished.

I disagree somewhat with the anti-license manifesto mentioned in the tangents. The one here: https://www.boringcactus.com/2021/09/29/anti-license-manifesto.html Problem is, if you do not license your software, then under existing 9th Circuit precedent it is illegal to use your software - for any purpose. You are creating a trap to be sprung on people who don't understand the law. Is the US legal system anti-justice, at least in the sense that the adversarial model of courts breaks down when applied to power disparities[0]? Absolutely. Is worrying about copyright at best a detour, in the sense that copyright has nothing to do with justice except to protect a certain few from a specific kind of exploitation? Yes. But we still need to at least pay lip service to it, if only to protect your users from being sued by you. "You", in this case, is maximally extended to not only every "you" that might exist in the future, but even people who may wind up inheriting your estate in the far future - which isn't far enough to cover the expiration of the copyright. You - as in, not you, but You - can stomp in at any time and sue individual users for large sums of money they can't pay, even if they merely ran the program. This isn't a hypothetical. The way that people share (freely-licensed and otherwise) software puts a target on them, and the system occasionally takes the shot[1]. For as long as copyright applies to the air we breathe, we have to worry about it. [0] Copyright…

I'm going to replicate one of my recent replies ([4] which unsurprisingly got me downvoted, but I regret nothing) here because it seems relevant. Specifically, Marak seems to grok the exploitatitive nature of the current setup (chosen in part by themselves) but lacks real negotiation leverage because they have no organization behind them (besides people cheering them on in the comments). With this in mind, I think it's okay for me to get the big scary words out here again. :) The problem (okay, "a" problem) here is that it is indeed OSS, and not FOSS, that is being used. It might be worth re-visiting "Post-Open Source" by Melody Horn (boringcactus) [1] on this. You might want to copy/paste that link instead of clicking. :) It has been discussed here before [2] and (unsurprisingly, IMHO) gotten quite a bit of blow-back from the HN crowd. The General Intellect Unit podcast recently had an episode on the piece [3] and I think they made the point clearer (well... also they roll the piece out to 1h 40min) by more openly posing it in a class struggle context. (Side note: please don't post replies attacking this as communist. The podcast has "marxists" in the name, you wouldn't be insulting them, and I'm merely engaging with their content, so if you're gonna try to attack their/my positions, please do the same and don't just throw scary words.) The bottom-line is that Open Source Software has nothing to do with the freedoms of the developers. It is... * a corporate…

I think this article: https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-gui-librar… was the most exhaustive review of accessibility that I know of.

// Vidrun, born of the sea-wind through the spruce // Vidrun, green-tinged offshoot of my bough, joy and burden of my life // Vidrun, fierce and clever, may our clan’s wisdom be yours: // // Never read Hacker News // - Aphyr, "Hexing the technical interview" if (document.referrer.startsWith("https://news.ycombinator.com")) { document.location = "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Human_fart.wav&quo… } > https://www.boringcactus.com/assets/site.js

yeah slint, which is most similar to Qt see https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-gui-librar…

it's no vandalism, it's done on purpose: https://www.boringcactus.com/assets/site.js // Never read Hacker News // - Aphyr, "Hexing the technical interview" if (document.referrer.startsWith("https://news.ycombinator.com")) { document.location = "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Human_fart.wav&quo… } this also mean that copying the link and pasting it in the address bar will get you no fart sound childish behavior if you ask me

> https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/09/16/survey-of-rust-embeddable-scri… For some reason, clicking on that link automatically downloads a file named "Human Fart.wav"...

See https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/21/survey-of-rust-gui-l... (2020) and https://www.boringcactus.com/2021/10/24/2021-survey-of-rust-... (2021). These write-ups don’t evaluate performance, but i assume any of these libraries which use Qt/GTK/Electron are as performant as Qt/GTK/Electron, and the libraries which draw using Skia or OpenGL are very fast.

> Like, everyone does realize that the tech giants just found a way to make the community work for them and to make money off the backs of it right? People are starting to realize this, but to understand it it's important to disambiguate "free" and "open source" software. See https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.html for one perspective.

View source: https://www.boringcactus.com/assets/site.js

> It refutes the idea that the "developer joy is pretty low" either way. https://deadmoney.gg/news/articles/migrating-away-from-rust https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-gui-librar… https://gist.github.com/rtfeldman/77fb430ee57b42f5f2ca973a3992532f https://medium.com/@rusty-vibes/part-4-abandoning-rust-for-c-83a1c2fd3… A pile of evidence refutes your statement. There is more if you need. > I'm happy to revise what I said from "Rust keeps winning" to "Rust continually won" "Rust has peaked"