Hacker News Reader

Comment by pcr910303 | Hacker News Reader

It's funny to see one arguing that Rust programs will be higher quality... in the GUI space. The AreWeGUIYet[0] website shows clearly that a GUI editor written in Rust won't cut. I'd rather argue that editors written in the platform-native language (e.g. ObjC/Swift on macOS) will result in higher quality editors.

If the author is viewing this comment, I'd recommend BBEdit[1], a solid & classic option. Other options might include Chime[2], a Go/Ruby-focused native IDE, or Nova[3], a VSCode-alike native-focused editor. I'm not sure if Chime or Nova would be as stable as TextMate though.

[0]: https://www.areweguiyet.com

[1]: https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/

[2]: https://www.chimehq.com

[3]: https://nova.app

View on HN

I disagree that ObjC or Swift would result in a better experience by themselves, however I assume you meant to say Cocoa/AppKit and SwiftUI, in which case I would agree.

Note that while SwiftUI benefits greatly from being written in Swift, you could write Cocoa/AppKit quite easily in many languages since it's fairly easy to bind ObjC. There's even Rust bindings https://docs.rs/cacao/latest/cacao/

For SwiftUI, I'm sure someone has written an adapter in other languages but there's so much under the hood magic that SwiftUI does that's tied into the language runtimes, that I think it would be truly herculean to do something in another language.

The state of GUIs in Rust is atrocious right now. Tbh my biggest hope is that Qt works well with Rust, I can really see a bright future there.

Egui is amazing, Tauri is a better Electron. Both of those things are infinitely better than Qt

Thanks for mentioning egui.

> immediate mode may actually be more performant compared to retained mode. Go to any web page and resize the browser window, and you'll notice that the browser is very slow to do the layout and eats a lot of CPU doing it. Resize a window in egui by contrast, and you'll get smooth 60 FPS at no extra CPU cost.

> you'll get smooth 60 FPS at no extra CPU cost.

The key part there is no EXTRA cost. Most immediate mode GUI libraries redraw 60 frames everytime, so there is a constant somewhat high cost, especially compared with a retained mode program.

Yeah this is something a lot of people overlook, in addition to accessibility.

Immediate UIs, without some partial retained backing, are going to redraw all the time. Especially on mobile devices, this can be a huge power suck

To clarify, egui has a mode where it only redraws while you're interacting with the app (e.g hovering, clicking). It doesn't do anything while idle (e.g. In between keystrokes)

Is there a modern and impressive desktop Qt application?

Almost the entirety of offline computer graphics tooling is written with Qt. Maya, Katana, Nuke etc...

Chances are, if you've seen a movie with any CGI, or played any 3D game, in the last decade, Qt was a major component in making it happen.

Qt also powers the Tesla screens, and most KDE apps and Krita.

Krita, SailfishOS, Calibre, Audacious, AsteroidOS, OBS, VLC, KDE (though I prefer a tiling WM, I have to admit Okular is superb). Qt is cross-platform too, and its FOSS and proprietary friendly.

> FOSS and proprietary friendly.

Aren't they strongly walking back on the first part?

The entirety of KDE apps (Krita, Kate, Dolphin, Okular, ...).

I have been working on a qt latex editor: TeXstudio

Although that is years old and perhaps not impressive

They work and they're cross platform. That's impressive and modern.

QGIS is pretty impressive.

Hi. The author is viewing the comment (finally). What I can tell you is just what I have observed -- compiled artifacts written in Rust, at least initially, seem to be higher quality than things written in C. Rust is a pretty high bar to achieve technical competence in and that seems to result in better quality particularly given that Rust is designed to eliminate a class of errors that plague GUI apps (namely memory leaks). Both of my daily drivers - TextMate 2 and iTerm - are both mature, well developed apps and yet leak memory like sieves and crash pretty regularly.

I will look into Chime and Nova and BBEdit. Go has some level of interesting approaches to development also although they don't go anywhere near as far as Rust.

I don't think I've ever had a memory leak or crash with iTerm in the many years I've been using it, so I'm surprised to hear of your experience.

Druid works quite well, and is likely enough for many GUI projects. I'm not sure what your reasoning is that implementing it in a platform-native language will work better. Are you referring to using their platform native UI to get the keybindings + inbuilt widget integration?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com