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It's funny to see one arguing that Rust programs will be higher quality... in the GUI space. The AreWeGUIYet[0] website shows clearly that a GUI editor written

It's funny to see one arguing that Rust programs will be higher quality... in the GUI space. The AreWeGUIYet[0] website shows clearly that a GUI editor written in Rust won't cut. I'd rather argue that editors written in the platform-native language (e.g. ObjC/Swift on macOS) will result in higher quality editors. If the author is viewing this comment, I'd recommend BBEdit[1], a solid & classic option. Other options might include Chime[2], a Go/Ruby-focused native IDE, or Nova[3], a VSCode-alike native-focused editor. I'm not sure if Chime or Nova would be as stable as TextMate though. [0]: https://www.areweguiyet.com https://www.areweguiyet.com [1]: https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/ https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/ [2]: https://www.chimehq.com https://www.chimehq.com [3]: https://nova.app https://nova.app

MinusGix 4y ago
Druid works quite well, and is likely enough for many GUI projects. I'm not sure what your reasoning is that implementing it in a platform-native language will work better. Are you referring to using their platform native UI to get the keybindings + inbuilt widget integration?
fuzzygroup 4y ago
Hi. The author is viewing the comment (finally). What I can tell you is just what I have observed -- compiled artifacts written in Rust, at least initially, seem to be higher quality than things written in C. Rust is a pretty high bar to achieve technical competence in and that seems to result in better quality particularly given that Rust is designed to eliminate a class of errors that plague GUI apps (namely memory leaks). Both of my daily drivers - TextMate 2 and iTerm - are both mature, well developed apps and yet leak memory like sieves and crash pretty regularly. I will look into Chime and Nova and BBEdit. Go has some level of interesting approaches to development also although they don't go anywhere near as far as Rust.
- drcongo 4y ago
  I don't think I've ever had a memory leak or crash with iTerm in the many years I've been using it, so I'm surprised to hear of your experience.
ghosty141 4y ago
The state of GUIs in Rust is atrocious right now. Tbh my biggest hope is that Qt works well with Rust, I can really see a bright future there.
- speedgoose 4y ago
  Is there a modern and impressive desktop Qt application?
  - Fnoord 4y ago
    Krita, SailfishOS, Calibre, Audacious, AsteroidOS, OBS, VLC, KDE (though I prefer a tiling WM, I have to admit Okular is superb). Qt is cross-platform too, and its FOSS and proprietary friendly.
    - solarkraft 4y ago
      > FOSS and proprietary friendly. Aren't they strongly walking back on the first part?
  - forgotpwd16 4y ago
    The entirety of KDE apps (Krita, Kate, Dolphin, Okular, ...).
  - petepete 4y ago
    QGIS is pretty impressive.
  - ok123456 4y ago
    They work and they're cross platform. That's impressive and modern.
  - dagmx 4y ago
    Almost the entirety of offline computer graphics tooling is written with Qt. Maya, Katana, Nuke etc... Chances are, if you've seen a movie with any CGI, or played any 3D game, in the last decade, Qt was a major component in making it happen. Qt also powers the Tesla screens, and most KDE apps and Krita.
dagmx 4y ago
I disagree that ObjC or Swift would result in a better experience by themselves, however I assume you meant to say Cocoa/AppKit and SwiftUI, in which case I would agree. Note that while SwiftUI benefits greatly from being written in Swift, you could write Cocoa/AppKit quite easily in many languages since it's fairly easy to bind ObjC. There's even Rust bindings https://docs.rs/cacao/latest/cacao/ https://docs.rs/cacao/latest/cacao/ For SwiftUI, I'm sure someone has written an adapter in other languages but there's so much under the hood magic that SwiftUI does that's tied into the language runtimes, that I think it would be truly herculean to do something in another language.

MinusGix 4y ago

Druid works quite well, and is likely enough for many GUI projects. I'm not sure what your reasoning is that implementing it in a platform-native language will work better. Are you referring to using their platform native UI to get the keybindings + inbuilt widget integration?

fuzzygroup 4y ago

Hi. The author is viewing the comment (finally). What I can tell you is just what I have observed -- compiled artifacts written in Rust, at least initially, seem to be higher quality than things written in C. Rust is a pretty high bar to achieve technical competence in and that seems to result in better quality particularly given that Rust is designed to eliminate a class of errors that plague GUI apps (namely memory leaks). Both of my daily drivers - TextMate 2 and iTerm - are both mature, well developed apps and yet leak memory like sieves and crash pretty regularly. I will look into Chime and Nova and BBEdit. Go has some level of interesting approaches to development also although they don't go anywhere near as far as Rust.

drcongo 4y ago
I don't think I've ever had a memory leak or crash with iTerm in the many years I've been using it, so I'm surprised to hear of your experience.

ghosty141 4y ago

The state of GUIs in Rust is atrocious right now. Tbh my biggest hope is that Qt works well with Rust, I can really see a bright future there.

speedgoose 4y ago
Is there a modern and impressive desktop Qt application?
- Fnoord 4y ago
  Krita, SailfishOS, Calibre, Audacious, AsteroidOS, OBS, VLC, KDE (though I prefer a tiling WM, I have to admit Okular is superb). Qt is cross-platform too, and its FOSS and proprietary friendly.
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    > FOSS and proprietary friendly. Aren't they strongly walking back on the first part?
- forgotpwd16 4y ago
  The entirety of KDE apps (Krita, Kate, Dolphin, Okular, ...).
- petepete 4y ago
  QGIS is pretty impressive.
- ok123456 4y ago
  They work and they're cross platform. That's impressive and modern.
- dagmx 4y ago
  Almost the entirety of offline computer graphics tooling is written with Qt. Maya, Katana, Nuke etc... Chances are, if you've seen a movie with any CGI, or played any 3D game, in the last decade, Qt was a major component in making it happen. Qt also powers the Tesla screens, and most KDE apps and Krita.

dagmx 4y ago

I disagree that ObjC or Swift would result in a better experience by themselves, however I assume you meant to say Cocoa/AppKit and SwiftUI, in which case I would agree. Note that while SwiftUI benefits greatly from being written in Swift, you could write Cocoa/AppKit quite easily in many languages since it's fairly easy to bind ObjC. There's even Rust bindings https://docs.rs/cacao/latest/cacao/ https://docs.rs/cacao/latest/cacao/ For SwiftUI, I'm sure someone has written an adapter in other languages but there's so much under the hood magic that SwiftUI does that's tied into the language runtimes, that I think it would be truly herculean to do something in another language.