Well https://github.com/timschmidt/egui-rad-builder has come together rather well in the last week of hacking, if I say so myself. I think building a similar app with QT, for example, would have been significantly more challenging.
I'm particularly fond of how easy it was to make all the controls live in the editor, and editable with changes appearing immediately. imgui would probably provide a similar experience, but I find C++ much more of a pain to work with than Rust.
I looked at Slint a couple years ago when I was evaluating UI toolkits. Looks slick! The only thing that turned me off was needing an additional DSL to define UIs. Trying to learn fewer languages, more deeply, these days. Is it possible to use Slint without the DSL?
Slint does require using its DSL to define UIs, but I'd argue it's not really like learning a whole new language. It's not harder than learning the API surface of any other GUI framework.
I don't think the DSL is any good. It looks weird (like a mix of CSS and classes), and it has a side effect of locking the user to a specific product.
In your article, you mention that an imperative code in Rust looks more complicated, but this can be fixed by adding an "object tree" syntax to Rust, that allows creating trees of objects and link them like this:
This syntax could be used not only for UI, but for describing configuration, database tables and many other things. I think it would be better solution than a proprietary language.
Also I think it would be better if GUI could be drawn in the editor, it would allow to use lower paid developers without expensive computer science education for making UI.
I appreciate the answer, and you taking time to write up your thoughts on it. Your point about the GUI builder working with the DSL is noted. In the egui RAD builder, I am manipulating structs which describe the UI (and which can be exported / imported as JSON) prior to code generation, which amounts to something similar. I still feel I have to context switch less, the back-and-forth is of more concern to me than learning an additional language.
That said, great work! There's plenty of room in the language for more than one solution!
That’s a compelling post. You drew me in by calling SQL a DSL. You’re right, but if you asked me to list the DSLs I use regularly I never would have thought of SQL until now. My thinking was too uptight because I didn’t consider the “domain” in DSL could be something as big as querying structured data. That makes me wonder if Rust is a DSL for the domain of general computing (obviously not in the usual intended meaning of DSL).
Like the person you’re replying to, I am generally averse to DSLs where the domain is a single project because I associate them with previous bad experiences where I spent time learning only to find it totally misses the mark. There’s also the issue of software where I’m the sole maintainer and look at it rarely. If it’s the only place I use Slint, then I’m going to be worried that I need to relearn the DSL in three months when I want to tweak the UI. Although you can probably say the same about any non-trivial framework’s API whether or not it uses a DSL.
All that said, I’ll be a bit more open to DSLs after reading your post, and if I ever need to write a GUI in Rust I’ll give Slint a shot (although that seems unlikely since I don’t typically write Rust or GUIs).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
One week of hacking makes every library look good, but have you shipped actual product that other people widely use with Rust GUI yet? What was the experience there and - most importantly - what were the downsides?
I've been working with egui for a couple years. Written maybe a dozen applications with it doing various things from image manipulation to 3D graphics. As I've said elsewhere in the thread, I haven't run into anything I wasn't able to accomplish with it.
Immediate mode has it's detractors, but in practice I've found it remarkably flexible, the resulting code relatively clean, and egui gets out of the way when I want to do something like blit fast graphics to a memory mapped area of the screen. Responses have been positive.
I'm particularly fond of how easy it was to make all the controls live in the editor, and editable with changes appearing immediately. imgui would probably provide a similar experience, but I find C++ much more of a pain to work with than Rust.