7 ms·

A Simple Rust GUI with QML

182 points by irfanka 10y ago

shmerl 10y ago
How does it compare to https://github.com/cyndis/qmlrs https://github.com/cyndis/qmlrs ?
- lordnaikon 10y ago
  This project is "dead" for quite some time now. Don't know if they really restructure the project (this was the last active conversation i witnessed in the issues section https://github.com/cyndis/qmlrs/issues/28 https://github.com/cyndis/qmlrs/issues/28 ) or if its just abandoned now. currently i use this for playing around with rust + qml https://github.com/White-Oak/qml-rust https://github.com/White-Oak/qml-rust this is the one used in the example, too
erichdongubler 10y ago
Gist that I've been developing for quick setup guides (PRs welcome!): https://gist.github.com/ErichDonGubler/c802e066de7068241f0e6e492e6584ed https://gist.github.com/ErichDonGubler/c802e066de7068241f0e6... We're still trying to get this to work with Windows. I've been reporting on this issue here: https://github.com/White-Oak/qml-rust/issues/31 https://github.com/White-Oak/qml-rust/issues/31. Any suggestions to get this going would be appreciated! Developing with Rust/QML on Windows definitely seems possible at this point...that said, most of what's left to be defined is what setup is required to actually get things to work.
- busterarm 10y ago
  It was a bit of a struggle, but I was able to get this going for Mac w/Homebrew. after `brew install qt5`, I had to `brew linkapps qt5` & `brew link --force qt5`. Then `ln -s /usr/local/opt/qt5/mkspecs /usr/local/mkspecs && ln -s /usr/local/opt/qt5/plugins /usr/local/plugins` which is super not ideal. I had some error and ran `brew install doxygen --with-qt5` which may not be necessary, but after these steps it built. Edit: scratch that. As soon as I try the example in main.rs, it fails to build again. 'ld: framework not found QtCore'
  - eridius 10y ago
    BTW, the qt5 formula explicitly says it's keg-only because it "has CMake issues when linked".
    - busterarm 10y ago
      Noticed that. Found some discussions about a possible bug in cmake or qt5 that were reported a month or two ago.
  - w4tson 10y ago
    I also have cmake installed for Mac w/Homebrew and used a binary install of qt-5.8. After adding the clang_64/bin dir on the $PATH I too am getting 'ld: framework not found QtCore'. Anyone able to suggest where I'm going wrong?
makmanalp 10y ago
Part of me wonders how much better web programming could have been a decade ago if QT was the standard that browsers implemented, and we just shipped around QT frontends that ran sandboxed in the browser.
- david-cako 10y ago
  I'm okay with the alternative. HTML + CSS + JS are just barely not shitty, but have such widespread adoption and libraries. Web apps are just so easy to package and maintain.
- d215 10y ago
  You mean something like Douglas Crockford's seif https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11273630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11273630 project?
  - makmanalp 10y ago
    Quickly skipping through the thread, this definitely sounds like it! I'd not heard about this. It looks like this definitely addresses part of my concern around HTTP being suboptimal as an application delivery mechanism, not sure how Qt ties into this. I'll have to dive in further. Thank you!
- pcwalton 10y ago
  And instead of JS, we'd be stuck with C++. Not an improvement. At least the frontend stack with the largest deployment—HTML, CSS, and JS—has a garbage collector and is memory safe. With C#/VB.NET on Windows, Swift on Mac/iOS, and Java on Android ascendant, this is now obviously the way to go. Imagine if we had permanently made the mistake of saddling the Web with manual, error-prone memory management.
  - makmanalp 10y ago
    Not true at all! Have you tried PyQT? It was in my experience an absolute pleasure to use, and I think satisfies your main criteria. No reason why there couldn't be similar bindings for any given language you prefer, though I understand the merits of standardizing on one. But also the point is that the Qt runtime would be part of the browser, which is usually all C++ or Rust or whatever anyway - not the web programmer's responsibility. What makes me sad is that Qt for a very long time has had a very well thought out ways of handling the complexities of UIs, including separating view from layout from business logic, doing layouts properly, they even have a pretty and lightweight DSL for defining UIs, which you can then style with a CSS-ish language. And a non-terrible UI builder on top of that. It even does responsive UIs these days! Granted, how well this would handle something as complex as current webapps is an interesting question, but they've always kept up with the changes, no problem. Also they did proper threads and event loops, data storage and query APIs, serialization, networking and sockets, highly performant 2D and 3D graphics (GPU-accelerated stuff!), an embedded browser, and all this was (and is) all cross-platform! It really was miraculous magic that we had this circa 2005-2007, and it's frustrating to see bits and pieces of this just recently getting web standards. If in this day and age I see one more proposal for how to do javascript promises or Commonjs / AMD / ES6 modules or something I'm going to die of frustration and exhaustion. :-(
david-cako 10y ago
What is it about Rust that makes porting QT different from any other language?
- mercurial 10y ago
  C++ is notoriously hard to bind. The only high-quality Qt bindings I know of are Python ones (Pyside).
  - therecipe 10y ago
    shameless plug for my Go binding: https://github.com/therecipe/qt https://github.com/therecipe/qt it's still WIP though
  - Siecje 10y ago
    What about PyQt5? Or does it work differently?
    - jacmoe 10y ago
      PyQt5 does not seem to be maintained. The last couple of times I checked it, it was pretty dead: one maintainer with no time.
      - ambrice 10y ago
        I think you have this backwards. PyQt5 is well maintained by a company that produces a GPL version and sells a commercially licensed version, which was Qt's original business model. Pyside was originally created by Nokia back when Nokia bought Qt, re-licensed it as LGPL, and needed LGPL python bindings. It's no longer maintained and only works with Qt4. Pyside 2 is a port of pyside to Qt 5 that seems to have some level of activity, but no releases..
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
        10y ago
conradev 10y ago
Because it has largely not been done before, part of me wonders how well Rust would work to build a large, complex GUI. All GUI code I've seen relies on inheritance and dynamic dispatch to structure APIs. I would love to see something like the Flutter Engine[1] written in Rust, which is a layer tree that runs in an OpenGL context and includes text rendering, shape drawing, gesture recognition, scroll layers, a layout engine, etc. – all components necessary for modern mobile app development. [1] https://github.com/flutter/engine https://github.com/flutter/engine
- pcwalton 10y ago
  > I would love to see something like the Flutter Engine[1] written in Rust, which is a layer tree that runs in an OpenGL context and includes text rendering, shape drawing, gesture recognition, scroll layers, a layout engine, etc. – all components necessary for modern mobile app development. WebRender and Servo together contain all of these.
  - conradev 10y ago
    Right, but those components exist as bindings for HTML/CSS/JS. It would be awesome to see a Rust UI framework built on top of them. It's certainly no coincidence that the top contributors to the Flutter engine are all Chromium contributors.
    - JasonSage 10y ago
      WebRender is not coupled in any way to HTML/CSS/JS as far as I know (I've used it in an app). Fundamentally, it allows you to represent a scene-graph and render it efficiently. How you go about constructing and manipulating your scene graph is up to the application which uses it. In Servo's case it parses HTML and CSS for structure and style and allows manipulations through JS through the DOM, but none of those are any concern for webrender.
      - conradev 10y ago
        Oh wow, that's awesome. Will have to try it out.
c-smile 10y ago
Just in case, Rust integration of Sciter is even easier: extern crate sciter; fn main() { let mut frame = sciter::Window::new(); frame.load_file("minimal.htm"); frame.run_app(); } Result: https://camo.githubusercontent.com/b7d9438384930801ba15d027d42ca23441924dae/687474703a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f6f6a634d354a4a2e706e67 https://camo.githubusercontent.com/b7d9438384930801ba15d027d... Rust/Sciter integration: https://github.com/sciter-sdk/rust-sciter https://github.com/sciter-sdk/rust-sciter
- IshKebab 10y ago
  Yeah but I feel like HTML GUIs are the antithesis of Rust. Granted, it may be the best option at the moment.
  - c-smile 10y ago
    Why is it an antithesis? HTML UI at the end is just a set of few simple concepts (at least with Sciter): 1. UI is a composition of just two universal components: Element and Node (text, comment, etc). 2. UI is a single rooted tree of such blocks - DOM tree. 3. The tree can be styled by well known CSS means. 4. Events are delivered to particular UI elements using bubbling/sinking event propagation schema. 5. Any DOM Element may have so called behavior assigned to it. The behavior is either native (C/C++/Rust/Go/etc) or script function. All <input> elements are normal DOM elements with corresponding behaviors attached. I do not see how this simple setup can be an antithesis to anything.
    - IshKebab 10y ago
      Because Rust is all about efficiency and doing things 'the right way'. HTML is one massive hack at this point and one that wasn't even designed for making desktop GUIs. It's also really slow compared to true GUIs. Remember Firefox OS? Yeah.
flukus 10y ago
I'd prefer some real rust bindings instead of screwing around with qml.
un008 10y ago
I prefer go-qml https://github.com/go-qml/qml https://github.com/go-qml/qml or PyQt

182 points by irfanka 10y ago

shmerl 10y ago

How does it compare to https://github.com/cyndis/qmlrs https://github.com/cyndis/qmlrs ?

lordnaikon 10y ago
This project is "dead" for quite some time now. Don't know if they really restructure the project (this was the last active conversation i witnessed in the issues section https://github.com/cyndis/qmlrs/issues/28 https://github.com/cyndis/qmlrs/issues/28 ) or if its just abandoned now. currently i use this for playing around with rust + qml https://github.com/White-Oak/qml-rust https://github.com/White-Oak/qml-rust this is the one used in the example, too

erichdongubler 10y ago

Gist that I've been developing for quick setup guides (PRs welcome!): https://gist.github.com/ErichDonGubler/c802e066de7068241f0e6e492e6584ed https://gist.github.com/ErichDonGubler/c802e066de7068241f0e6... We're still trying to get this to work with Windows. I've been reporting on this issue here: https://github.com/White-Oak/qml-rust/issues/31 https://github.com/White-Oak/qml-rust/issues/31. Any suggestions to get this going would be appreciated! Developing with Rust/QML on Windows definitely seems possible at this point...that said, most of what's left to be defined is what setup is required to actually get things to work.

busterarm 10y ago
It was a bit of a struggle, but I was able to get this going for Mac w/Homebrew. after `brew install qt5`, I had to `brew linkapps qt5` & `brew link --force qt5`. Then `ln -s /usr/local/opt/qt5/mkspecs /usr/local/mkspecs && ln -s /usr/local/opt/qt5/plugins /usr/local/plugins` which is super not ideal. I had some error and ran `brew install doxygen --with-qt5` which may not be necessary, but after these steps it built. Edit: scratch that. As soon as I try the example in main.rs, it fails to build again. 'ld: framework not found QtCore'
- eridius 10y ago
  BTW, the qt5 formula explicitly says it's keg-only because it "has CMake issues when linked".
  - busterarm 10y ago
    Noticed that. Found some discussions about a possible bug in cmake or qt5 that were reported a month or two ago.
- w4tson 10y ago
  I also have cmake installed for Mac w/Homebrew and used a binary install of qt-5.8. After adding the clang_64/bin dir on the $PATH I too am getting 'ld: framework not found QtCore'. Anyone able to suggest where I'm going wrong?

makmanalp 10y ago

Part of me wonders how much better web programming could have been a decade ago if QT was the standard that browsers implemented, and we just shipped around QT frontends that ran sandboxed in the browser.

david-cako 10y ago
I'm okay with the alternative. HTML + CSS + JS are just barely not shitty, but have such widespread adoption and libraries. Web apps are just so easy to package and maintain.
d215 10y ago
You mean something like Douglas Crockford's seif https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11273630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11273630 project?
- makmanalp 10y ago
  Quickly skipping through the thread, this definitely sounds like it! I'd not heard about this. It looks like this definitely addresses part of my concern around HTTP being suboptimal as an application delivery mechanism, not sure how Qt ties into this. I'll have to dive in further. Thank you!
pcwalton 10y ago
And instead of JS, we'd be stuck with C++. Not an improvement. At least the frontend stack with the largest deployment—HTML, CSS, and JS—has a garbage collector and is memory safe. With C#/VB.NET on Windows, Swift on Mac/iOS, and Java on Android ascendant, this is now obviously the way to go. Imagine if we had permanently made the mistake of saddling the Web with manual, error-prone memory management.
- makmanalp 10y ago
  Not true at all! Have you tried PyQT? It was in my experience an absolute pleasure to use, and I think satisfies your main criteria. No reason why there couldn't be similar bindings for any given language you prefer, though I understand the merits of standardizing on one. But also the point is that the Qt runtime would be part of the browser, which is usually all C++ or Rust or whatever anyway - not the web programmer's responsibility. What makes me sad is that Qt for a very long time has had a very well thought out ways of handling the complexities of UIs, including separating view from layout from business logic, doing layouts properly, they even have a pretty and lightweight DSL for defining UIs, which you can then style with a CSS-ish language. And a non-terrible UI builder on top of that. It even does responsive UIs these days! Granted, how well this would handle something as complex as current webapps is an interesting question, but they've always kept up with the changes, no problem. Also they did proper threads and event loops, data storage and query APIs, serialization, networking and sockets, highly performant 2D and 3D graphics (GPU-accelerated stuff!), an embedded browser, and all this was (and is) all cross-platform! It really was miraculous magic that we had this circa 2005-2007, and it's frustrating to see bits and pieces of this just recently getting web standards. If in this day and age I see one more proposal for how to do javascript promises or Commonjs / AMD / ES6 modules or something I'm going to die of frustration and exhaustion. :-(

david-cako 10y ago

What is it about Rust that makes porting QT different from any other language?

mercurial 10y ago
C++ is notoriously hard to bind. The only high-quality Qt bindings I know of are Python ones (Pyside).
- therecipe 10y ago
  shameless plug for my Go binding: https://github.com/therecipe/qt https://github.com/therecipe/qt it's still WIP though
- Siecje 10y ago
  What about PyQt5? Or does it work differently?
  - jacmoe 10y ago
    PyQt5 does not seem to be maintained. The last couple of times I checked it, it was pretty dead: one maintainer with no time.
    - ambrice 10y ago
      I think you have this backwards. PyQt5 is well maintained by a company that produces a GPL version and sells a commercially licensed version, which was Qt's original business model. Pyside was originally created by Nokia back when Nokia bought Qt, re-licensed it as LGPL, and needed LGPL python bindings. It's no longer maintained and only works with Qt4. Pyside 2 is a port of pyside to Qt 5 that seems to have some level of activity, but no releases..
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - 10y ago

conradev 10y ago

Because it has largely not been done before, part of me wonders how well Rust would work to build a large, complex GUI. All GUI code I've seen relies on inheritance and dynamic dispatch to structure APIs. I would love to see something like the Flutter Engine[1] written in Rust, which is a layer tree that runs in an OpenGL context and includes text rendering, shape drawing, gesture recognition, scroll layers, a layout engine, etc. – all components necessary for modern mobile app development. [1] https://github.com/flutter/engine https://github.com/flutter/engine

pcwalton 10y ago
> I would love to see something like the Flutter Engine[1] written in Rust, which is a layer tree that runs in an OpenGL context and includes text rendering, shape drawing, gesture recognition, scroll layers, a layout engine, etc. – all components necessary for modern mobile app development. WebRender and Servo together contain all of these.
- conradev 10y ago
  Right, but those components exist as bindings for HTML/CSS/JS. It would be awesome to see a Rust UI framework built on top of them. It's certainly no coincidence that the top contributors to the Flutter engine are all Chromium contributors.
  - JasonSage 10y ago
    WebRender is not coupled in any way to HTML/CSS/JS as far as I know (I've used it in an app). Fundamentally, it allows you to represent a scene-graph and render it efficiently. How you go about constructing and manipulating your scene graph is up to the application which uses it. In Servo's case it parses HTML and CSS for structure and style and allows manipulations through JS through the DOM, but none of those are any concern for webrender.
    - conradev 10y ago
      Oh wow, that's awesome. Will have to try it out.

c-smile 10y ago

Just in case, Rust integration of Sciter is even easier: extern crate sciter; fn main() { let mut frame = sciter::Window::new(); frame.load_file("minimal.htm"); frame.run_app(); } Result: https://camo.githubusercontent.com/b7d9438384930801ba15d027d42ca23441924dae/687474703a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f6f6a634d354a4a2e706e67 https://camo.githubusercontent.com/b7d9438384930801ba15d027d... Rust/Sciter integration: https://github.com/sciter-sdk/rust-sciter https://github.com/sciter-sdk/rust-sciter

IshKebab 10y ago
Yeah but I feel like HTML GUIs are the antithesis of Rust. Granted, it may be the best option at the moment.
- c-smile 10y ago
  Why is it an antithesis? HTML UI at the end is just a set of few simple concepts (at least with Sciter): 1. UI is a composition of just two universal components: Element and Node (text, comment, etc). 2. UI is a single rooted tree of such blocks - DOM tree. 3. The tree can be styled by well known CSS means. 4. Events are delivered to particular UI elements using bubbling/sinking event propagation schema. 5. Any DOM Element may have so called behavior assigned to it. The behavior is either native (C/C++/Rust/Go/etc) or script function. All <input> elements are normal DOM elements with corresponding behaviors attached. I do not see how this simple setup can be an antithesis to anything.
  - IshKebab 10y ago
    Because Rust is all about efficiency and doing things 'the right way'. HTML is one massive hack at this point and one that wasn't even designed for making desktop GUIs. It's also really slow compared to true GUIs. Remember Firefox OS? Yeah.

flukus 10y ago

I'd prefer some real rust bindings instead of screwing around with qml.

un008 10y ago

I prefer go-qml https://github.com/go-qml/qml https://github.com/go-qml/qml or PyQt