It's kind of an exploratory phase for what works sensibly with Rust's borrow checker, especially since most UI libraries/frameworks really rely on a GC.
I'm using EGUI for a all-in-one molecular viewer / CAD. It's like PyMol, Coot, GROMACS and VMD in one. If this is trivial, I would like to see what you consider to be non-trivial!
There are parts of the rust ecosystem that are only built for trivial apps (And demos, blog posts etc), but GUI is not one.
Look, your application is certainly impressive, but it's extremely basic from the perspective of a UI toolkit.
- It's not multi-window, so it doesn't have to integrate with a bunch of the OS window management affordances.
- It doesn't have any complicated typesetting or rich text editing, so you get to pretty much ignore that whole mess.
- Since it's a very visual tool that doesn't make much sense for blind folks, you haven't invested much in accessibility support.
- And so on...
This is a great use case for EGUI, and EGUI works great in this sort of UI-lite scenario. Whereas I wouldn't want to use it to implement something on the complexity of VSCode/Excel/FireFox.
And quite amazing work, so thank you for sharing. This will be fun to dive into. I'm generally liking egui but have just recently been using it, so I'm still new at it.
The most popular language by far used for writing UI is JavaScript, and the go to framework this day (React) doesn't use that though.
From the various experiments that popped up over the years, it's pretty clear that the React way works pretty well for Rust, but it's also too slow to be desirable for Rust (what's the point of using Rust for UI if you're going to have web-like performance).
And then again, making a half decent UI framework is a gigantic task, there's just not a whole lot of languages with a decent UI story at all, no matter what's the paradigm of the programming language. (And if you want a
language for cross-platform UI, I'd argue that the only one that ticks the box is JS with React in Electron and React Native, and it's not even truly a single framework).
The view part would be fine, the problem is updating the state. In a language which discourages shared mutability, most of the solutions are not terribly ergonomic.
You either end up needing to:
- handle all your state via interior mutability (i.e. Arc<RefCell<_>>)
- use a reducer (i.e. the state blob is immutable during rendering, updates are deferred via events that are delivered between frames)
- or invert the relationship between state and view (i.e. immediate-mode) which comes with it's own implementation challenges (caching immediate mode views is hard)
It's kind of an exploratory phase for what works sensibly with Rust's borrow checker, especially since most UI libraries/frameworks really rely on a GC.
And none of them really work for non-trivial apps! Welcome to hell
I'm using EGUI for a all-in-one molecular viewer / CAD. It's like PyMol, Coot, GROMACS and VMD in one. If this is trivial, I would like to see what you consider to be non-trivial!
There are parts of the rust ecosystem that are only built for trivial apps (And demos, blog posts etc), but GUI is not one.
Look, your application is certainly impressive, but it's extremely basic from the perspective of a UI toolkit.
- It's not multi-window, so it doesn't have to integrate with a bunch of the OS window management affordances.
- It doesn't have any complicated typesetting or rich text editing, so you get to pretty much ignore that whole mess.
- Since it's a very visual tool that doesn't make much sense for blind folks, you haven't invested much in accessibility support.
- And so on...
This is a great use case for EGUI, and EGUI works great in this sort of UI-lite scenario. Whereas I wouldn't want to use it to implement something on the complexity of VSCode/Excel/FireFox.
Is that application by any chance open source?
Yep - https://github.com/David-OConnor/daedalus/
Awesome! Thank you!
And quite amazing work, so thank you for sharing. This will be fun to dive into. I'm generally liking egui but have just recently been using it, so I'm still new at it.
It’s just not actually a very good language for writing UIs in compared to say Dart, Swift or Kotlin.
Yeah, it turns out the popular UI paradigms rely on a lot of mutable state
The most popular language by far used for writing UI is JavaScript, and the go to framework this day (React) doesn't use that though.
From the various experiments that popped up over the years, it's pretty clear that the React way works pretty well for Rust, but it's also too slow to be desirable for Rust (what's the point of using Rust for UI if you're going to have web-like performance).
And then again, making a half decent UI framework is a gigantic task, there's just not a whole lot of languages with a decent UI story at all, no matter what's the paradigm of the programming language. (And if you want a language for cross-platform UI, I'd argue that the only one that ticks the box is JS with React in Electron and React Native, and it's not even truly a single framework).
A UI is by definition a view of some mutable state.
The view part would be fine, the problem is updating the state. In a language which discourages shared mutability, most of the solutions are not terribly ergonomic.
You either end up needing to:
- handle all your state via interior mutability (i.e. Arc<RefCell<_>>)
- use a reducer (i.e. the state blob is immutable during rendering, updates are deferred via events that are delivered between frames)
- or invert the relationship between state and view (i.e. immediate-mode) which comes with it's own implementation challenges (caching immediate mode views is hard)
> - use a reducer (i.e. the state blob is immutable during rendering, updates are deferred via events that are delivered between frames)
This is how I implemented my last Angular project, works fine for non-trivial tasks.
Rust is fine with mutable state, it just strongly encourages that it not be shared. Egui seems fine, we've used it to good effect.