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Comment by phtrivier | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this abstraction already done (at least partly) by gtk ? (Or are you thinking of another level of abstraction - otherwise gtk would be enough ?)

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When it comes to using only GTK+ for the cross-platform use-case, it already has the Cocoa and Win32 back-ends built in via the GDK, which that API is abstracted to GTK+ so that work is already done. It maybe enough to solve the Rust GUI problem on Win/Mac/Linux, however the drawback to using GTK+ is that it will look out of place on other platforms other than Linux, because of the GNOME _look and feel_ it brings.

I think the author might have to support GTK+ theming options to counter this issue then? If not then perhaps using GTK+ for Linux and using the win32 and cocoa crates separately and abstracting that might be something worth looking at?

however the drawback to using GTK+ is that it will look out of place on other platforms other than Linux, because of the GNOME _look and feel_ it brings.

It is not worse than electron in that respect ;). But some small Rust Gtk+ utility that I have for personal uses a whopping 7564KB of resident anonymous memory.

Personally, my issue with Electron is that, in practice, it is hugely inefficient. The up-side to Electron, IMO, is that it doesn't try to straddle the uncanny valley of native GUIs. In GTK, usually everything _looks_ like a normal GUI, but behaves/looks just a little (or, often times, a lot) bit different than what is expected.

Not only will it look out of place, but last time I checked, GTK has zero accessibility (e.g. with screen readers) on Windows or Mac.

No gtk draws its own widgets.

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