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There is often a criticism of Javascript, that new frameworks seem to appear every week. But it honestly feels like every week on HN there is a new Rust UI proj

There is often a criticism of Javascript, that new frameworks seem to appear every week. But it honestly feels like every week on HN there is a new Rust UI project showing up. Whether it is some new HTML/web thing, a native app thing, a TUI thing, etc. Don't get me wrong, I think that is the sign of a very healthy ecosystem. I am just curious how the Rust evangelists will spin this. Somehow this constant churn on the Javascript side is worthy of snide, satire and ridicule. IMO, UI development is deceptively hard. Rendering scalable graphics efficiently is hard enough. Creating a good layout engine and a set of reliable basic controls is even more difficult. But managing interfaces seems to scale quadratically with the number of controls, views, states, etc. I see programmers, over and over, underestimate how difficult of a task managing that complexity can be. This complexity leads to difficult to use libraries/framework/platforms. It also leads naive and ambitious developers to believe they can do better. This leads to more and more new libraries/frameworks/platforms.

duped 3y ago
It's a somewhat hot area of development and there isn't a clear winner yet, so of course there are new projects all the time.
kibwen 3y ago
> Somehow this constant churn on the Javascript side is worthy of snide, satire and ridicule. In my experience it is frontend devs, not backend devs, who are most harsh on Javascript's procession of UI frameworks. Rust users are more than happy to take inspiration from Javascript UI frameworks, if for no other reason than the reactive/declarative approach is a better fit for Rust than the prevailing inheritance-heavy/object-oriented approach of Qt and GTK.
zemo 3y ago
it’s a different situation though: very few people have shipped guis in Rust, so the Rust projects are largely greenfield, while a lot of JavaScript front ends are legacy apps.
a_humean 3y ago
All of these rust libraries and frameworks are in their infancy and there are no clear winners yet. Its probably less of a sign of a healthy ecosystem, and more of a sign of an immature ecosystem. There are a few projects that seem promising, but all of that could be invalidated by next week. Meanwhile in the js ecosystem things are both incredibly stable and also in flux. All of the usual suspects are still around, but competing in ways intergrate both server and client rendering as seamlessly as possible. There is also some movement around introducing optimising compilers - see solid and svelte. But its probably safe to say, ignoring the tooling churn going on with Rust, Go, and Zig seemingly systematically replacing all js tooling like for like, things are pretty stable when it comes to js ui libraries.
nicoburns 3y ago
While there are a lot of Rust UI frameworks, none of them are really recommended for production use yet. I suspect a few of the will die off and work will coalesce a few once things mature a bit. Another nice feature of the Rust UI ecosystem is that lots of it is being built in a modular way. For example I maintain a layout engine [0] library which just does layout and can be easily integrated by anybody creating a UI library. And there a bunch of similar composable libraries covering rendering, text layout, accessibility, window creation, clipboard access, etc. [0]: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy
samstave 3y ago
>>" Rendering scalable graphics efficiently is hard enough" As a not-UI dev guy, what will be awesome is when a stack solves the scaling/swiping. Imagine being able to swipe a UI from one UX to another UX - I See my blood pressure on my E-watch... I swipe right to throw that details onto my laptop... ... I swipe up to throw that shit on the EMR at the doctors office... Or I have a vitals monitor on my watch and when the ambulance picks me up they can just slurp my historics via my watch and an AI starts doing prognoses asap. Those who do this, win all the money. (not to mention the threat this is to HOSPITAL CODES or INSURANCE PAYMENT CODES) -- Yeah those bitches will be upset when this happens.
marcosdumay 3y ago
Nobody expects you to go and learn this week's Rust UI project, or to abandon last week's one. If go looking for a job, you will discover the people working with Rust UI hire Rust developers, not Tokyo (yeah, that one was many weeks ago) ones or whatever else. Those developers are expected to be able to learn and adapt to whatever framework the place uses. All of that is completely opposite to how things happen with Javascript.
__david__ 3y ago
Slint has been around for quite a while now. A few years ago it was called SixtyFPS. I used it for a cross compiled Windows app (did 99% of the development on macOS) and it was quite nice. It was a little limited as far as widget customization went (without getting down and writing your own widgets from scratch) but app ended up looking nice and behaving decently. It also lacked a few features I'd say were essential for any non-small desktop app (multiple top level windows weren't a thing a year ago, not sure if they've been added yet). I quite liked their DSL for the UI scripting. It was even typechecked a bit and interfaced with Rust in a fairly clean way. It's one of the nicer UI libraries I've used in a while.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

duped 3y ago

It's a somewhat hot area of development and there isn't a clear winner yet, so of course there are new projects all the time.

kibwen 3y ago

> Somehow this constant churn on the Javascript side is worthy of snide, satire and ridicule. In my experience it is frontend devs, not backend devs, who are most harsh on Javascript's procession of UI frameworks. Rust users are more than happy to take inspiration from Javascript UI frameworks, if for no other reason than the reactive/declarative approach is a better fit for Rust than the prevailing inheritance-heavy/object-oriented approach of Qt and GTK.

zemo 3y ago

it’s a different situation though: very few people have shipped guis in Rust, so the Rust projects are largely greenfield, while a lot of JavaScript front ends are legacy apps.

a_humean 3y ago

All of these rust libraries and frameworks are in their infancy and there are no clear winners yet. Its probably less of a sign of a healthy ecosystem, and more of a sign of an immature ecosystem. There are a few projects that seem promising, but all of that could be invalidated by next week. Meanwhile in the js ecosystem things are both incredibly stable and also in flux. All of the usual suspects are still around, but competing in ways intergrate both server and client rendering as seamlessly as possible. There is also some movement around introducing optimising compilers - see solid and svelte. But its probably safe to say, ignoring the tooling churn going on with Rust, Go, and Zig seemingly systematically replacing all js tooling like for like, things are pretty stable when it comes to js ui libraries.

nicoburns 3y ago

While there are a lot of Rust UI frameworks, none of them are really recommended for production use yet. I suspect a few of the will die off and work will coalesce a few once things mature a bit. Another nice feature of the Rust UI ecosystem is that lots of it is being built in a modular way. For example I maintain a layout engine [0] library which just does layout and can be easily integrated by anybody creating a UI library. And there a bunch of similar composable libraries covering rendering, text layout, accessibility, window creation, clipboard access, etc. [0]: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy

samstave 3y ago

>>" Rendering scalable graphics efficiently is hard enough" As a not-UI dev guy, what will be awesome is when a stack solves the scaling/swiping. Imagine being able to swipe a UI from one UX to another UX - I See my blood pressure on my E-watch... I swipe right to throw that details onto my laptop... ... I swipe up to throw that shit on the EMR at the doctors office... Or I have a vitals monitor on my watch and when the ambulance picks me up they can just slurp my historics via my watch and an AI starts doing prognoses asap. Those who do this, win all the money. (not to mention the threat this is to HOSPITAL CODES or INSURANCE PAYMENT CODES) -- Yeah those bitches will be upset when this happens.

marcosdumay 3y ago

Nobody expects you to go and learn this week's Rust UI project, or to abandon last week's one. If go looking for a job, you will discover the people working with Rust UI hire Rust developers, not Tokyo (yeah, that one was many weeks ago) ones or whatever else. Those developers are expected to be able to learn and adapt to whatever framework the place uses. All of that is completely opposite to how things happen with Javascript.

__david__ 3y ago

Slint has been around for quite a while now. A few years ago it was called SixtyFPS. I used it for a cross compiled Windows app (did 99% of the development on macOS) and it was quite nice. It was a little limited as far as widget customization went (without getting down and writing your own widgets from scratch) but app ended up looking nice and behaving decently. It also lacked a few features I'd say were essential for any non-small desktop app (multiple top level windows weren't a thing a year ago, not sure if they've been added yet). I quite liked their DSL for the UI scripting. It was even typechecked a bit and interfaced with Rust in a fairly clean way. It's one of the nicer UI libraries I've used in a while.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]