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by junon 1359 days ago
Judging by this comment, I sincerely question what "professionally" means. You miss a lot of benefits and focus on the one thing that has very little to do with why people might want this.
1 comments

Why would people want to build a UI in Rust except for speed? Memory safety doesn't seem super important in the UI context.

There is a reason most people still refer to Rust as a "systems" language.

There’s plenty of domain specific desktop software that costs $5k-100k per seat per year that is horribly buggy to the point of crashing several times during the course of a professional’s average day. Stuff like Altium, Solidworks, Xpedition, COMSOL, and all the big name FPGA suites crashed all the damn time when I used them for nontrivial projects.

All of the above packages are so complex that it’s not possible to control downstream code that gets invoked by user action. Rust’s importance here isn’t in the memory safety but in the features that enable Rust’s guarantees, which can also be used to create and enforce complex logic and rules using the same type level concepts.

> Why would people want to build a UI in Rust except for speed?

Lots of reasons.

* The developer is familiar with Rust.

* The rest of the project is written in Rust.

* The primary function of the app is something for which a library exists in Rust.

Sure, Rust is known for running fast and for memory safety. But that doesn't mean that it will never be used except for those two reasons.

Yup. I write all my UI's in Rust. I write, well, everything in Rust. Why? Because i prefer it, and there is no task that i feel is fundamentally hindered by Rust itself. Shortcomings in libraries can definitely hinder, but that gets better with each year.
> Why would people want to build a UI in Rust except for speed?

For speed and its modern language (and poorer ecosystem). People already program gui in c++ for this very reason. So what is this rant about exactly? The usage of async? It's a valid way to do it, not the only one but valid.