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Comment by nu11ptr | Hacker News Reader

> I've been able to build incredibly rich, enterprise-ready UI with Rust today.

Which UI crate did you use? The word "enterprise" caught my eye. So far I haven't found a Rust UI crate that I found rich enough, so I'm curious your experience.

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I think you'll find two definitions of enterprise ready. People who make UIs and are comparing a UI crate to see how it stacks up, and people who write business logic in rust and only care that they were able to make a gui work without switching to some other language. I would put my org in the second situation. Someone bought the thing and didn't complain so good enough I guess. We were using egui.

Ahh, gotcha. Yeah "enterprise" to me meant: "I can write/maintain a UI rich/polished enough to pass as a 'shrink wrapped' app to my end users".

Thanks for the reply.

FWIW that reply was from a different person :D

In my case I did mean "I can write/maintain a UI rich/polished enough to pass as a 'shrink wrapped'"

The notion of shrink wrapped software dates us I think? But to that end, I have elements of so many different native looks jumbled around in my head all the way back to amiga workbench (deluxe paint was the best), that anything without really obvious flaws like off centered text or unresponsive buttons feels shrinkwrappable to me. By my standard any of these looks is enterprise ready. I remember someone at MS looking at a gui made by a team my friend was on and mocking it for looking like it was out of tron with saturated colors on a black background in high contrast instead of "modern" 3d grey buttons. It looked a lot more like the linked UI than anything MS was producing at the time. So there is the fashion aspect of it. You want to stand out, but not too much. I think that is the aspect I'm unable to judge. If everything is in the first or second place I look, I just won't care.

> I did mean "I can write/maintain a UI rich/polished

FWIW, you wrote that you actually HAVE done so, not just that you think you could:

"but I've been able to build incredibly rich, enterprise-ready UI with Rust today."

Unless one has actually done so, and maintained/extended over a period of time, and not solo but with others, I don't know that one can be certain that a UI toolkit is good enough; certainly, it would be hard to know what surprising edges and ergonomics there are to consider in one's evaluation.

I have built it. It hasn't existed for long enough for me to say I've maintained it for an extended period of time, but then again I did not claim that. Nor did I use the word "certain". There's no certainty in life.

I hear your point, but it's important to note I'm not making those claims and I don't think all of that needs to be true for it to be some value of "enterprise-ready". You and I may disagree on the meaning of that term, and that's fine.

Can you provide more details? Links to the implementation of available? Framework you used? Pain points?

I used the `iced` framework and I can't link to it because it's not available to the general public yet.

Pain points were learning to think in The Elm Architecture early on and creating very complex custom widgets of my own (think a spreadsheet editor, for example)

I made some tiny apps available on my github as I was learning Rust and the library. None really meet the enterprise grade hurdle but show some of what's possible with little code. If you spend a little while longer you can make them much more polished, obviously. I kept them "unpolished" so they would be even easier for beginners to follow

https://github.com/airstrike/iced_receipts

https://github.com/airstrike/pathfinder

I've had a lot of success with egui. We've needed to do some weird stuff and I've always been pleasantly surprised to see that the API is expressive enough that we're always able to work within the bounds of the library. Great documentation too.

I have a feeling iced would work similarly well but the documentation situation wasn't as good last I checked.

The issue with the documentation is a lack of guides or tutorials, but the crate is 100% documented and I think the examples cover 100% of what 90% of people need. Looking at other apps helps too.

And if you're on Discord, the community is 10/10. I'm there all the time and always helping newcomers, and so are many others.

I used `iced` but admittedly I also used a lot of elbow grease. Custom Theme, custom widgets and lots of passion to get it to look Just Right.

Cool. Any publicly available source code? If not, any screenshots at least? I'm curious as what Iced is capable of (with extra widgets/themes/etc. like you mentioned).

Unfortunately it's closed source and we're invite-only at this point so I can't share, but hopefully in a few weeks

I do share screenshots and screen recordings every now and then in the iced Discord but I've so far refrained from posting about it on HN which is a much bigger audience

I suppose the best description of the UI is a mashup of VSCode and Figma

Cosmic is built on iced, so you could look what they achieved.

look into Cosmic Desktop and SniffNet as examples, both use Iced and IME are very high quality

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