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Comment by hot_gril | Hacker News Reader

The GUI bindings are usually the hard part.

Speaking of, does anyone know how Qt bindings for Rust are these days? Last time I looked, there were several awkward Rust APIs for Qt, suffering in part from the fact that Qt's API is inheritance-based.

I think it's pretty difficult mapping the Qt memory management model to Rust, for the same reason we haven't seen working Golang bindings for Qt either. I have some experience with the Python bindings (PySide or PyQt) and both of them use pretty extensive wrapper generator frameworks specially developed for the task (SIP in the case of PyQt, Shiboken in the case of PySide), coming up with something like that is not an easy task at all. And Python is a language that was pretty much intended to act as a foreign function wrapper around low-level languages, while Rust & Golang are not primarily intended to be wrappers for other languages.

> https://github.com/therecipe/qt

Do these not work? (Not a rhetorical question - I haven’t tried them.)

They used to work until the big modules change a few golang releases ago. Now, nothing works anymore unless you exhume a sufficiently old golang compiler.

The project also seems dead since 2020 or so, a current fork is https://github.com/bluszcz/cutego/ But I haven't tried that one.

I see what you mean about this particular project, but more generally, you can certainly use pre-modules Go code with current Go compilers. See e.g. https://github.com/golang/go/issues/37797 (a case of someone not RTFMing, but the response illustrates how it's done).

If you just want to pretend modules never happened, then export GO111MODULE=off and use the latest Go compiler.

In most cases, these things would work, but not here. Tried everything, nothing works except using a pre-modules-compiler.

In general, golang seems to work best with golang-only projects. As soon as there are other languages in the mix, like C++ here, things get very ugly very fast.

Ah, I think I misinterpreted what you meant by "nothing works anymore". I thought you were saying that no old Go projects were usable with new Go compilers. I believe you that this particular project may not work with the current toolchain.

Ah, yes, that wasn't sufficiently clear in my text. In almost all projects I've done/used, go modules work fine and are nice. It is just this one library that I know ceased to work.

There is a recent article about this on r/rust https://blog.logrocket.com/build-desktop-app-qt-rust/

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