Comment by Severian
1 day ago
Uhhh.. for a page thats about GUIs, this seems awfully sparse for the actual look and feel of said GUIs.
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.
The answer to the question posed in the site's domain name is "no", unfortunately.
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.
"no" is reductive to the point of being misleading.
Cosmic DE is built using iced which is a rust gui library. As far as native, single-platform guis go, I'd say rust is plenty mature.
There's also Bevy, a rust game engine, which, if I'm not mistaken is built on egui(?), and I think supports multiple compile targets.
Between a desktop environment and a game engine, I'd say rust is in a pretty decent place when it comes to gui.
“No” is a straightforward answer to “areweguiyet” in Rust. Many well intentioned and well-invested projects with no winning GUIs means we’re not there yet.
Saying “almost” or “yes” privileges the activity and hype around Rust GUI over actual results. Bevy is the ironic example: a game engine that produces more discussion and code than, so far, one notable & good game.
> There's also Bevy, a rust game engine, which, if I'm not mistaken is built on egui(?)
Not entirely correct, they have bevy_ui as the in-house example but many people use the third party bevy_egui crate
Yes, I think it's trying to be comprehensive (as far as possible) rather than detailed. Given the amount of frameworks listed, including representative screenshots or comparisons for each would be a substantial effort.
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-...
Opening that site prompts my browser to download a `Human_fart.wav` file.
Seems like a referrer of HN triggers that. Copy & paste the URL and it works fine. Idiotic.
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Almost all the screenshots in this article are “hello world”…
How would screenshots help you in accessing a framework? How would you know whether a button supports accessibility and whether you need to declare it as a button in code or in a DSL? Or whether text editing supports mac-specific shortcuts?
At most it could give you an idea about whether some widgets are supported, but even there a list you could filter frameworks by would be worth a thousand screenshots
Is that actually needed? Styling is largely a user decision. They might have defaults yes, but if you looked at a raw HTML page with no CSS styling, you might come to the conclusion that websites have an ugly GUI...
It absolutely is. Defaults matter, most developers just want a GUI for their app that doesn't look like ass. Almost no one wants to mess with styling.
That's why developers have UI/UX and design experts assigned to them. That's why Figma exists. CSS was an attempt to not have to deal with styling. It failed, and landed in the other direction.
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This is the mindset that gives you Java-Style GUIs.
I love Java-style GUIs though.
Perhaps it's to show how fragmented the community is.