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by adwn 1029 days ago
For our client, we've developed a desktop application in Rust – with a thin GUI frontend in C++/Qt – to filter, process, and visualize sensor data streams (3D point cloud data from a Lidar). Each data stream was about 400-500 Mbit/s in 55k UDP packets per second, with support for at least 4 simultaneous streams. The focus was on high performance and development speed, security didn't matter at all.

We chose Rust for its unique position in the performance/productivity tradeoff space, and didn't regret it even for a second. There's no way we could have pulled this off with C++ in the same time, especially the bug-free parallelization.
1 comments
jenadine 1029 days ago
Why use C++ for the front-end though?
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adwn 1029 days ago
We selected Qt as a cross-platform solution. The C++/Rust interface is the clunkiest and ugliest part of the application, and rather complex because some state is shared between several windows in the GUI and several threads in the backend, and any component might modify that state at any time, and updates have to be transmitted to the other components without introducing inconsistencies. However, using cxx [1] helped a little.

The project began in 2020, and I'm not sure what I'd choose as a GUI framework today – definitely not Qt Widgets, though.

[1] https://cxx.rs/

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