Pretty cool project, seems like it's becoming more realistic to write cross platform native desktop applications with OS-specific GUIs in Rust.

It's not too far from the write-once-run-everywhere philosophy of React native, Electron and similar. One could write their UI state and application logic once while maintaining 3 entry points using the various platform GUI bindings (gtk-rs, cacao, win32?) to represent the UI state.

This has the advantage of a project feeling natural to the platform while still allowing for code reuse between platforms - though you would still need to rewrite widgets/components for each platform independently.

Something that isn't talked about much in the GUI world (outside of mobile development) is how essential multi-threading is to a great application experience. After all, you can't horizontally scale a client device so it's important that an application is able to maximize its use of the available hardware. Rust's borrow checker/ownership model eliminates dangerous multi-threaded code which makes it practical to write highly efficient GUI applications.

Could be good for projects like cross-platform terminal emulators or code editors.

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.

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