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by mdhb 238 days ago
But that’s no longer the choice you need to make. Ubuntu themselves have said for a couple of years now that every new GUI app they make natively for Linux is going to be Flutter and dedicated a bunch of engineers to the project to make sure it’s a first class citizen.

Beyond that, Dart / Futter are truly an absolute pleasure to use for that use case.
2 comments
johnisgood 238 days ago
Yeah, I do not know Dart / Flutter much, but if I had to choose, I would either pick that, or wxWidgets, or even Tcl/Tk, but not Rust.
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timschmidt 238 days ago
Sounds great for the Dart people. But unrelated to correcting misinformation about Rust. I'm not opposed to whatever language folks want to use. Just out here hacking in Rust because it suits my particular needs. And finding that it's enjoyable to hack GUIs as well as firmwares in.
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mdhb 238 days ago
No I get all that, but to the parent comments point however, there’s no way in hell I would ever pretend for a moment that one is as straightforward as the other and it’s no longer a choice between Rust and C++ both of which add a lot of complexity to a scenario where it offers very little benefit.
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timschmidt 238 days ago
Over the years, I've found that the complexity is there whether or not it's been papered over by a runtime. It's wonderful to forget about, until it's not. Some applications may never run into the limitations imposed by abstracting it away, but others run into them quickly.

"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" as the saying goes.

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mdhb 238 days ago
To which the counter argument I guess would be.. there’s no sense in trying to solve for some abstract future set of problems that the vast majority of people are never going to have ahead of time on the off chance you’re one of them.

That too requires a substantial investment of time and resources.

I think in a more pragmatic sense too that you can form a very good understanding on if you’re going to have weird special requirements just from looking at what others have done with the same tools in similar situations before you.

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timschmidt 238 days ago
> there’s no sense in trying to solve for some abstract future set of problems that the vast majority of people are never going to have

> That too requires a substantial investment of time and resources.

The discussion has gotten to be pretty abstract at this point. To get back to concrete examples, the egui RAD builder I've been hacking on worked on day 1, first commit. It's been a joy to put together, and no more difficult than building GUI apps with any other toolkit I've worked with. Which causes me to question your statements about additional complexity. You can dig deep and do dark magic with Rust if you want, but you can also treat it like any high level language and get things done quickly. That's part of what makes it a rare gem to me.

Some folks don't like dealing with strict types, or with the borrow checker, but I find that the errors they illuminate for me would have been similarly serious in other languages which lacked the tooling to highlight them. Which adds to my appreciation of Rust.

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