Colin Rofls

This is a strange take for me- people are CONSTANTLY trying to find new, better ways to do UI. Elm, React, DearIMGUI, Flutter, and Xilem are some of the more well-known fairly recent libraries. See https://raphlinus.github.io/rust/gui/2022/07/15/next-dozen-guis.html for an overview of UI libs in Rust. See https://www.cmyr.net/blog/gui-framework-ingredients.html for a great overview of some of the challenges making a GUI library

http://www.cmyr.net/blog/gui-framework-ingredients.html has a bunch of what you'll need to know about building a GUI from scratch, especially if you're interested in any of the "hard parts" rather than making a toy. It's Rust rather than C++ but many of the principles are similar. Other than that, I do recommend the immediate mode GUI approach if you're writing everything yourself, as it's the lowest overall system complexity of all the approaches. It has a number of drawbacks, and things don't abstract/compose as easily as a standard object-oriented retained, or a newer React/SwiftUI approach, but exposing the raw parts has its upsides.

Not a direct answer but a good read/overview. https://www.cmyr.net/blog/rust-gui-infra.html and the precursor https://www.cmyr.net/blog/gui-framework-ingredients.html

Do you happen to know if Relm addresses accessibility at all, or has plans to do so in the future? Every time I see a Rust GUI post, that's my first question: https://www.cmyr.net/blog/rust-gui-infra.html#accessibility

Didn't know about Skia previously! Thank you for the excellent suggestion! So, let's provide some links: Overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skia_Graphics_Engine Homepage: https://skia.org/ Source: https://skia.googlesource.com/skia/ (or) https://github.com/google/skia Also -- there's this old HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28143972 where the following github projects which involve drawing are mentioned: https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx https://github.com/memononen/nanovg https://github.com/wjakob/nanogui In the following article: https://www.cmyr.net/blog/gui-framework-ingredients.html we find the following interesting quote: >"These APIs exist, in subtly different form, on the various platforms. on macOS, there is CoreGraphics [Quartz 2D], on windows Direct2D, and on linux there is Cairo. One approach, then, is to present a common API abstraction over top of these platform APIs, puttying over the rough edges and filling in the gaps. (This is the approach we have currently taken, with the piet library.)" So, some more quick links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct2D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_(graphics_layer) Piet: https://docs.rs/piet/latest/piet/ https://github.com/linebender/piet Related: 2018 Paper: "A Proposal to Add 2D Graphics Rendering and Display to C++": https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/p0267r8.pdf