4 ms·

What's the development experience scene like for Rust GUIs? In my experience developing Electron apps there are a a couple major plusses that I'm not sure Rust

by jakear 6y ago

What's the development experience scene like for Rust GUIs? In my experience developing Electron apps there are a a couple major plusses that I'm not sure Rust can compete with, based only on my limited knowledge of the ecosystem: - Excellent embedded developer tools. Hundreds of thousands of engineer-hours have gone into the chromium devtools, providing everything from styling overrides to layout metrics to profiling tools to a REPL to DOM tree inspection and modification, to an integrated debugger, etc etc etc, and all of that is at your disposal with a simple Cmd+Opt+I. To my knowledge Rust doesn't have anything like this. - Super quick incremental updates. Making a change and seeing the impact is sub-second, even on large projects (vscode). Based on my understanding of rust, recompilation can take a very very long time. When making GUI's a lot of the time is spent making finicky little changes and reloading -- if that inner loop is slow you're going to have a bad time.

raphlinus 6y ago
I've talked up the strengths, you've brought up the big weaknesses. I think there is some interesting work on both of these fronts, but the developer experience situation is very primitive so far by comparison. Compile times have been getting better. For reference, on my machine an incremental build of Runebender is 2.3s. Part of this reflects some choices we've made to use platform capabilities rather than build the entire stack ourselves.
- pornel 6y ago
  DevTools is the killer feature. I've developed a Gtk GUI in Rust recently. It wasn't bad, but I probably won't use it ever again. When I'm debugging a UI, I want to right-click it, select Inspect, and be able to tweak everything live. DevTools is such a force multiplier, that I'm confident I can quickly and reliably develop a whole GUI from scratch, with custom layout animations and bells and whistles using JS+CSS. I have zero confidence in doing anything in Gtk or Cocoa beyond dumping static pre-built controls in a window. The cycle of editing blindly, recompiling, and re-running is the old paradigm that I don't want to return to.
  - jakear 6y ago
    Seems to me like the future could well be TS/Electron with bindings to Rust for system-level high perf activities. Let the UI scripting language and mature rendering platform do the UI scripting and rendering, and let the high performance systems programming language do the performance-critical system interfacing. For example, in vscode we do almost everything in TS, but shell out to ripgrep for workspace text search.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Great, here is an off topic quick feedback to someone from VSCode, in what concerns search I always end up starting notepad++ Ctrl-Shif-F, get what I was searching for, meanwhile VSCode just keeps showing its increasing blue line without any results to show up. Which is quite disappointing, given ripgrep's reputation in search performance.
      - jakear 6y ago
        Have you perhaps disabled ignore files accidentally? It’s the toggle in right of the the exclude field.
        pjmlp 6y ago
        Seems to be enabled, oh well there are enough Github issues related to search performance anyway. Thanks for the help.
        jakear 6y ago
        Up to you if you want to go through the rigamarole, though we do appreciate every issue^, even if we do end up closing it as a duplicate :) ^well, every issue that isn't completely void of information ;)
    - brundolf 6y ago
      This is what some people have started doing, and it works well as long as your bottleneck lives outside of the UI itself. But for some highly complex apps, web layout itself can become the bottleneck, and that's really hard to work around. VSCode is an absolute miracle in this regard, but it uses lots of dirty tricks under the hood to accomplish that.
thayne 6y ago
Otoh, despite the name, electron apps are very heavy in terms of both memory and disk size, have a long load time, and can be very slow if not designed well.
pjmlp 6y ago
Same applies to other native GUI tools, like WPF/WinUI(UWP), Qt, Cocoa,... The Rust semantics also seem to make it quite complex to just drag components around on a GUI designer, because the lifetimes become dynamic and just dropping a component in the middle of a form can have multiple lifetime meanings, depending on the surrounding context.
- detaro 6y ago
  Qt at least has Gammaray for introspecting running apps.
  - nyanpasu64 6y ago
    GammaRay is like Dev Tools but extremely unstable, and requiring fiddling with ptrace permissions on Linux, and I don't know how to make it work on Windows.
higerordermap 6y ago
Flutter is an example you can have efficient AOT compilation while not sacrificing ability to hot reload during development. The tooling is not here yet. But there are drawbacks to using web and flutter is already promising. Any progress in this field should be welcomed by us.

by jakear 6y ago

raphlinus 6y ago

I've talked up the strengths, you've brought up the big weaknesses. I think there is some interesting work on both of these fronts, but the developer experience situation is very primitive so far by comparison. Compile times have been getting better. For reference, on my machine an incremental build of Runebender is 2.3s. Part of this reflects some choices we've made to use platform capabilities rather than build the entire stack ourselves.

pornel 6y ago
DevTools is the killer feature. I've developed a Gtk GUI in Rust recently. It wasn't bad, but I probably won't use it ever again. When I'm debugging a UI, I want to right-click it, select Inspect, and be able to tweak everything live. DevTools is such a force multiplier, that I'm confident I can quickly and reliably develop a whole GUI from scratch, with custom layout animations and bells and whistles using JS+CSS. I have zero confidence in doing anything in Gtk or Cocoa beyond dumping static pre-built controls in a window. The cycle of editing blindly, recompiling, and re-running is the old paradigm that I don't want to return to.
- jakear 6y ago
  Seems to me like the future could well be TS/Electron with bindings to Rust for system-level high perf activities. Let the UI scripting language and mature rendering platform do the UI scripting and rendering, and let the high performance systems programming language do the performance-critical system interfacing. For example, in vscode we do almost everything in TS, but shell out to ripgrep for workspace text search.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Great, here is an off topic quick feedback to someone from VSCode, in what concerns search I always end up starting notepad++ Ctrl-Shif-F, get what I was searching for, meanwhile VSCode just keeps showing its increasing blue line without any results to show up. Which is quite disappointing, given ripgrep's reputation in search performance.
    - jakear 6y ago
      Have you perhaps disabled ignore files accidentally? It’s the toggle in right of the the exclude field.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        Seems to be enabled, oh well there are enough Github issues related to search performance anyway. Thanks for the help.
        jakear 6y ago
        Up to you if you want to go through the rigamarole, though we do appreciate every issue^, even if we do end up closing it as a duplicate :) ^well, every issue that isn't completely void of information ;)
  - brundolf 6y ago
    This is what some people have started doing, and it works well as long as your bottleneck lives outside of the UI itself. But for some highly complex apps, web layout itself can become the bottleneck, and that's really hard to work around. VSCode is an absolute miracle in this regard, but it uses lots of dirty tricks under the hood to accomplish that.

thayne 6y ago

Otoh, despite the name, electron apps are very heavy in terms of both memory and disk size, have a long load time, and can be very slow if not designed well.

pjmlp 6y ago

Same applies to other native GUI tools, like WPF/WinUI(UWP), Qt, Cocoa,... The Rust semantics also seem to make it quite complex to just drag components around on a GUI designer, because the lifetimes become dynamic and just dropping a component in the middle of a form can have multiple lifetime meanings, depending on the surrounding context.

detaro 6y ago
Qt at least has Gammaray for introspecting running apps.
- nyanpasu64 6y ago
  GammaRay is like Dev Tools but extremely unstable, and requiring fiddling with ptrace permissions on Linux, and I don't know how to make it work on Windows.

higerordermap 6y ago

Flutter is an example you can have efficient AOT compilation while not sacrificing ability to hot reload during development. The tooling is not here yet. But there are drawbacks to using web and flutter is already promising. Any progress in this field should be welcomed by us.