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I am glad that there are people looking at GUI from the perspective of Rust. Many Rust idioms and patterns, like ownership and immutability, are very promising
by klabb3 4y ago
I am glad that there are people looking at GUI from the perspective of Rust. Many Rust idioms and patterns, like ownership and immutability, are very promising for GUI development.
However, this article also confirms an issue I have observed with the Rust ecosystem, which is fragmentation. It would have made me much more excited to see convergence behind one project than 15 different ones. I think Rust enthusiasts, bless their hearts, are often so excited about the puzzle of the language representations, that the output often ends up being more of a POC than a well-maintained library for users. It seems more-than-usual amount of projects are abandoned when the intellectually stimulating honeymoon phase is over. As a prospective user, this is probably fine for small leaf-dependencies, but it’s a major show-stopper for something like GUI.
I’ve never expressed it like this before, but I think there’s a moderately serious issue when a language seduces you away from the domain problem and towards the language itself, even if that is subjectively enjoyable. (In other languages like perhaps Java or C++, the language quirks are at least so dreadful that only masochists are spending more time than necessary on it)
- crispinb 4y ago> an issue I have observed with the Rust ecosystem, which is fragmentation. Absolutely. The fragmentation doesn't matter with all library types, because they don't all need the vast array of associated libraries, tools, common practices etc which mainstream GUI apps lean on. Wide GUI framework/library adoption needs a head of steam (far more than it needs architectural elegance). Right now I don't foresee this happening with Rust. Not everything is foreseeable, of course.