[nmilo]

I find it odd the rust community feels the need to reimplement tried and tested APIs in "pure safe Rust". Like no other language has better C integration, and we have had cross-platform windowing libraries since like the 90's, why does everyone reach for a brand new unstable libraries with less maintainer support?

Edit: replying to https://tritium.legal/blog/desktop, not the OP

[staticassertion]

My very weak understanding is that a lot of the C/C++ libraries heavily leverage concepts like inheritance that don't map well to Rust, and so a lot of the GPU work has been "how do we actually make this an idiomatic API?" and that has required more experimentation.

AFAIK people 100% are using other libraries for UI, but often use a macro or something to force Rust to behave in a way that those libraries expect.

I haven't read about this in literally years, but that's my recollection.

[duped]

GUI is much more than just cross platform windowing. Which fwiw, is a mostly solved problem in Rust - there's not a bunch of reimplementation or instability. The ecosystem is solidified behind winit (*).

Also, we don't have good cross platform desktop GUI libraries in C. That's why everyone started using Electron.

(*) with some small exceptions

[jauntywundrkind]

Aside from Rust being better (impl is such a great decoupling, fearless type safety), there is afaik nothing one tenth as useful and good as cargo & is crate ecosystem (docs rs, crates.io, and all the packages).

I find it odd the broader hacker community feels the need to requestion and cross-examine every choice for using rust. Like, no other language has such great just works ergonomics, with a solid language, fantastic tooling, excellent packages that gives it a just works the first time cross-platform joy. Why does every thread have to spawn a brand new unsupported whinge throwing dirt at what seems like such an obvious enjoyable choice?

[saghm]

I think you might be misunderstanding the parent comment. It sounds to me like they're arguing in favor of wrapping C GUI library when writing a GUI app in Rust, not avoiding Rust entirely. As far as I can tell, they're arguing for writing new stuff in Rust that happens to be re-using some components that aren't in Rust. I'd argue that's entirely in the spirit of Rust; kind of the whole point is that you can put a hard boundary on where the unsafety lies and make everything safe outside of that boundary. When I use a Vec or a HashMap, there's unsafe code under the hood, but it doesn't stop me from writing my own code without needing to dip into unsafe at all, and there's no fundamental reason why the same couldn't be done by wrapping Qt or Gtk on Linux or Cocoa or MacOS.

[piker]

Qt is great, but it's a commercial license.

[pixelesque]

Not if you dynamically link it. LGPL.

[piker]

Is it that simple?

[jauntywundrkind]

Happy 10 years to the GPL & LPGLv2.1->LGPLv3 license update & Qt starting to expose more of Qt. https://lwn.net/Articles/671755/

[apitman]

On desktop it can be pretty simple. On mobile it can be a hot mess. Essentially with LGPL you have to provide a way for users to replace your version of the LGPL lib with one they choose.

Also the company seems to be trying to wiggle out from under the open source spirit of the license the last few years, which doesn't bode well.

[nmilo]

Ah, I meant to reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47003058. Never questioned the use of Rust, only the need for the entire windowing stack to be in Rust (that blog post shows a case where it bit them)

[drnick1]

One could argue that Rust isn't well suited for GUI development at all, where class-based OOP really shines.

Then there is the issue that the Rust community likes to rewrite classic C programs because of "memory safety" and "modern tooling," but really just focuses on the easy 80% of the work. It feels like these rewrites are more done to gain popularity on GitHub than anything, as they most often remain incomplete and never replace the original implementation.

Finally there is the GPL to MIT licensing issue, on which much has been said already.

[shdh]

Rust build times are not an enjoyable part of its DX

[yencabulator]

Ever chase a segfault that happened through a callback called by the GUI framework? The promise of Rust is to eliminate that. Wrapping a C library implies unsafe Rust which can't do that. It's genuinely pleasant to develop thing with that baseline robustness.

[zem]

yeah, it's fine that people are experimenting with new gui toolkits from scratch but I wish gtk integration got a lot more love.