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by adastra22 221 days ago
I have used egui in actual projects. It is slow, opinionated in a bad way, not very customizable in terms of themes, and definitely not up to date in terms of latest GUI standards. It isn’t even the best RUST GUI project by any of those metrics.
1 comments
the__alchemist 221 days ago
Interesting! I am using it in some complex stuff with 3D graphics (A structural biology/molecular dynamics tool), and it is a great experience. I need to compare it to GPGUI and Slint; would love to compare the pros and cons first-hand.

I love how Slint works on embedded devices too.

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adastra22 221 days ago
As I said above, they all suck in some way. It's a matter of deciding what is most important to you and picking the one that sucks least for that.

Egui is easy to get started with, and has a lot of widgets that work out of the box. The performance story isn't great, layout options is terrible (largely due to being immediate mode), and it is not very customizable. You take what they give you, and you like it.

Iced is a phenomenal and well-thought out API that is a wonder to work with. When it does what you need, which it often doesn't because it's not nearly as complete as the alternatives. But if you know that a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, Iced might be right for you.

Slint is like Qt, but Rust. I don't think I need to say any more - if you have used Qt before, that sentence either immediately sold you on it, or convinced you to never go near it.

GPUI is a wonderful, extremely fast, stable, perfect API. If you are making a cross-platform native text editor. If you are doing anything else, sorry :(

There are a slew of projects bridging rust to run packaged browser apps which have some sort of DSL for specifying HTML front ends. People seem to like this for some reason. Some people also like being chained up in leather and whipped. I sometimes wonder if these are the same people.

Ratatui really is the best of the bunch. It has layout, accessibility, nice and easy user interface. It's a wonder to work with. Only problem: it is a TUI, not a GUI.

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