Blog of Raph Levien.
Visit raphlinus.github.io → RSS feedOn Hacker News Oct 2018 – Mar 2025
Software Engineering 18Games & Graphics 10Math & Algorithms 9Web & Frontend 6Systems & Performance 4Design & UX 3
Rust is an appealing language for building user interfaces for a variety of reasons, especially the promise of delivering both performance and safety. However, finding a good architecture is challenging. Architectures that work well in other languages generally don’t adapt well to Rust, mostly because they rely on…
This is a response to the Rust call for blogs 2021 and also a followup to last year’s entry. It will be entirely focused on GUI.
A few times a week, someone asks on the #gui-and-ui channel on the Rust Discord, “what is the best UI toolkit for my application?” Unfortunately there is still no clear answer to this question. Generally the top contenders are egui, Iced, and Druid, with Slint looking promising as well, but web-based approaches such…
Update 7 May 2022: A followup to this post containing significant conceptual advance is Xilem: an architecture for UI in Rust. I consider the Crochet experiment to be mostly negative, as there were a number of ergonomic and functional “paper cuts,” though several of the research goals were met, at least to some extent.
In response to the call for blogs about the vision for Rust for 2020, I’m going to write about GUI. I believe the time is right for a native GUI toolkit written in Rust, and that such a thing would fill a very important niche. There is a demand for performance (which, to me, includes startup time, RAM footprint, and…
Update 26 Sep 2020: A followup to this post is Towards principled reactive UI.