... But I can pretty much do this today with Tauri? The missing bit here IMO is why we need to rebuild webdev-like tooling in a Rust-only framework rather than just use it.
But you're definitely right that devex is one of the web's main strengths. It's really hard to replicate that without a massive community like the one the web has; that's going to be a sticking point for any native framework (which if we're honest, are going to remain a niche going forward)
Even with cross-platform frameworks, there's a big fragmentation problem right now. And even if there weren't, native development as a whole is simply a smaller community these days
It's not the size of the community. It's the use of interpreted languages and strong introspection and a (relatively) consistent platform called "the browser". That's what make devex so different to native.
Sure, the endless stream of new frameworks etc. also contributes to the difference, but it's not as fundamental IMO.
More seriously though, that's a fair question. Anything that isn't the web has a lot of catching up to do before it can compare to the web.
(Though browsers are increasingly relying on rust frameworks for low-level work, so there's some potential for code reuse.)
My gut feeling answer would be "because things built for the web have a tendency to fail for no reason, and things built in Rust have a tendency to work on the first try". I'd have a hard time backing up that gut feeling with hard numbers, but I think it's a shared one. Web techs tend to have all sort of legacy cruft and small papercuts and stuff. Mature Rust crates are easy to install, work immediately and have an intuitive API. My hope is to get to a point where developing Rust GUI is just easy, no papercuts.
(But again, lots of catching up to do first.)
If you're comparing legacy web code to new and modern rust crates of course it's not a fair comparison. just wait until the until the second wave of rust gui libs, it will be a similar pain of legacy code when the web industry went from Angular v1 to React. Legacy projects, outdated packages and brittle build processes, now with rust there will also be the added "benefit" of a more complicated programming language.
Stop saying stuff like this. It's not true and it pushes people away bc you look fanatic
It’s not all sunshine and roses, and the lack of things like browsers’ dev tools can certainly be painful, but Rust honestly is good enough to warrant serious consideration even in spaces where these difficulties apply.
PoignardAzur was speaking lightheartedly, but I honestly don’t think it’s an unreasonable general sentiment.
But even so, would you stake a current native UI toolkit to last longer, and provide more value, before that day?
There are good reasons to write truly native UI. Performance is very persuasive. Longevity, perhaps less so.
If you stake the basic ideas of the framework on the DOM, then DOM details will become implementation details which will become details that clients will depend on. And you'll have just re-written React but with even more layers.
It needs to be thought about in terms of first principles, ala SICP. There are basic primitives to be defined that are the "ground," and then it is built up from there.