I am currently writing a desktop application in Rust. It’s a jellyfin client for music.
I think the main reason is that writing Rust is a joy that gives you confidence. This is important to me as I often have small amounts of time to work on it (new dad). With rust I can start implementing a small feature, as long as it compiles I can be reasonably sure it works. In Python I’d be wading through a sea of runtime errors and never quite sure I actually got it right.
Cross platform is another good reason. UI library support is good. You have iced like this app, but also decent GTK bindings.
No runtime needed makes distribution and packaging infinitely easier than Python.
It’s a great language for writing desktop apps.
As a user, I agree, I really like downloading a single, small binary that is a full-fledged desktop app. Hell, I downloaded Halloy just because it wasn't Electron, and it looks really nice, too!
I feel like the same can be said for golang but rust just has a more pleasant way of sometimes doing things.
some of the best ways to build gui's on golang might be gtk golang bindings imo. I haven't tried qt but gtk for linux should work.
I have seen many apps also use golang as backend and flutter as frontend (warp android app wormhole or something and localsend both do this)
Good point about Python. Python is so hit or miss on every platform and it's kind of difficult to distribute any complex python app unless you distribute your own python build along with it. Otherwise you have multiple levels of dependency hell, unique to each platform.
Any way to follow your progress? I considered writing one myself, although not rust based.
Sure :) https://github.com/Fingel/gelly