All that is to say that I'm glad there's another way to get Rust on mobile aside from stuff like flutter_rust_bridge.
[0] https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs
[1] https://www.rubdos.be/2026/04/17/my-sailfish-os-journey-apps...
egui is the clear winner for making desktop applications. I've built a complex application recently (think of it like an AI powered image editor, doing plenty of editor logic and communicating with several python backends for the AI part) and it's been smooth sailing. It would be nice to have a family of components that look native on every platform but nowadays the desktop experience is anyway wildly inconsistent (and web-centric).
Using qt bindings is a good option too, but depending on non rust code means you are more likely to catch some weird crash. My experience with Qt in Rust is years old, so I can't comment on stability.
For frontend development, leptos is really nice and it feels familiar coming from react - but the whole chain is too heavy, your target directory quickly balloons to GBs and that's unacceptable, especially if you have several frontend projects.
I vibe coded a proof of concept leptos (including islands) with a minimal runtime and no dependencies and the size was much more contained. There is margin for improvements but today I would stick with solid.js for frontend development.
The other big hurdle for Rust on the web is the need to compile to wasm. That means that any Rust application will be heavier than a similar app in another JS framework. If we could target js instead of wasm, maybe we could have apps with small bundles.
Qt QML is already annoying in C++ since you have to juggle 2 lifetime systems, c++ manual lifetime management and QMLs QML engine (aka gargabe collection).
The downside is that the dependency stack you need to do gui programming with rust is massive and the compile times are brutal. You can’t beat the application performance, though. It’s crazy how nice it feels compared to bloated electron apps.
The question of “are we gui yet” is definitely yes, at least on the desktop. The problem is that developers are too lazy to build apps with anything other than web frameworks.
GPUI getting the public release greenlight will no doubt be a turning point for desktop GUI development. All it took is a small team of gifted developers to dogfood their own GUI toolkit and get some much-needed VC backing. The future looks very bright.
Also shoutout to ratatui because even though it's technically a TUI not GUI, it's superb.
Strengths:
- Message passing model with separate Model and View paths
- Async / Sync landscape (sync on the GUI thread, tasks / subscriptions for async stuff with messages returned to the GUI thread)
- Writing custom Widgets is quite easy! In 0.14 stateful widgets got a revamp and they are quite nice
- Performance is great
- Despite being very capable, the framework is not that large. Learning it is not a daunting task
- Documentation might be sparse, but due to how it's written, I was able to just read the code and understand how it works without issue
- Lots of changes between releases (still pre 1.0)
- Theming. Despite being (somewhat) recently reworked, it's still overcomplicated imo
- The layouting engine is tricky to use and I fight with it much more than I should. Quite often widgets do not show up at all or take too much space because I didn't use the right combination of `Length` variants for `width` and `height` of the widget (and/or its children)
- Some interfaces seem a bit weird (I am specifically thinking about overlays)
- There is some confusion regarding what should go in the application state and what should be held in Widget's state. The interfaces are clearly defined here, but what can be / should be done is often found out in practice (perhaps I lack experience here)
Severian•1h ago
How about some screenshots?
Its very difficult to compare X to Y anywhere on this site. Its just an aggregator, not really an exemplary resource.
entrope•1h ago
It looks like it just grabbed the intro to each project's self-description, but blurbs like "Zero-cost ultra-high-performance declarative DOM library using FRP signals" would be worth very little even with screenshots.
hirako2000•1h ago
zipy124•1h ago
bla3•1h ago
qweqwe14•1h ago
fragmede•1h ago
NoboruWataya•1h ago
The best primer on the current(ish) state of GUI programming in Rust, IMO, is this article from 2025 which is linked on that page: https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-...