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Comment by ikawe | Hacker News Reader

One example would be the lack of pragmatic rust native GUI libraries. There are wrappers for GTK and Qt, which are probably your best option.

The most popular pure rust ones are based on somewhat esoteric patterns and seem prone to being abandoned.

Within that there are some interesting options, like for functionally reactive programming and immediate mode guis, but these paradigms aren’t all encompassing and in fact cover a pretty minority use case based on what GUIs are being created today.

Maybe one day we’ll all only ever create purely functional GUIs and speak Esperanto, but until then, we’re a little hamstrung in rust.

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I think that's more a function of the newness of the language than anything else. Golang is (I say this as a Rust developer) more popular, has been around longer, yet still has the same dearth of GUI libs.

I can't speak for Go, but idiomatic Rust is not friendly towards the kinds of object graphs that are typical in traditional GUI frameworks with event handlers etc. You either end up with ARC everywhere, which is a pain because it's not transparent in Rust; or you have to come up with the aforementioned "exotic patterns", which significantly raises the bar for adoption.

Yet, web developers have been using some of those exotic patterns for ages and they don't complain. They even prefer that way to traditional GUIs by using Electron massively now. Rust GUI frameworks are typically based on strict separation between a model and a view and communication between them with messages which is something much closer to web programming than traditional GUI programming. An OOP soup with arbitrary handlers messing around with state directly in random places is IMHO a bad idea in any language anyway.

MVC originated in desktop GUIs, originally for Smalltalk. Java Swing was, I believe, the first mainstream GUI framework which used it thoroughly. Most GUI frameworks since then are also MVC (or some derivative thereof, like MVVM in .NET). This is just a way of organizing code and has little to do with presence of absence of event handlers, or the web.

I didn't mean MVC so much, as message passing between the view and the model. Safe Rust has no problem with MVC nor its derivatives.

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