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I Switched from Flutter and Rust to Rust and Egui

105 points by jdiaz97

by lazypenguin

0 subcomment

There’s a big advantage to having your whole application in one language. I’m not sure the experience of egui on mobile though but egui is great to use as a developer
Pros * Solid widget set * Easy to get started * Less state management * Easy to make custom widgets * Active community and crates (e.g docking view, tables, etc.) * Fast to build new Ui
Con * Harder to do layouts (has multipass and some flexbox crates but still hard and compile loop makes it slow to iterate) * Bring your own architecture (no restrictions on how you build your app so easy to make spaghetti if you’re not careful)
Egui is currently my favorite Rust UI crate although Slint and iced are also interesting.

by dark__paladin

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I'm not a UI dev but I have messed with Qt some. Does egui or some other rust framework the same native look that Qt does?

by merksoftworks

2 subcomments

So egui is great for projects where the application runtime is short lived, or for overlays in longer lived projects. The visual equivalent of scripts, where you know you need a small amount of immediate visual feedback and tweaking parameters for it to be useful to the end user.
Flutter answers questions about more robust UI.
It's good that you chose the right tool for the job and more people should know that there are options. But fundamentally I'm most motivated by the possibility of a robust UI framework made from first principles to be as low friction as egui but with the accessibility, performance, and visual flexibility of stylable retained mode guis.
Raph Levien and the xilem project might be getting us closer.

by strogonoff

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Immediate mode GUIs are cool but it seems that accessibility support is somewhat lacking. In native frameworks you often get it for free, on the Web you can follow ARIA and get it for free, but with immediate mode GUIs it seems that it is always a bit of an afterthought. For example, it seems that egui supports AccessKit, but not when used on the Web. With Dear ImGui it seems worse, there is some effort in that direction but tickets about accessibility are open (this is based on a quick scan, I may be wrong).
I guess it makes sense since immediate mode focuses on speed and applications like games, but if only there was best of both worlds.

by paldepind2

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> A quick Google search with "flutter setstate is not refreshing" reveals a struggle that you will face quite often when running Flutter. It sounds like an easy fix, but the nature of Flutter using a bunch of nested Widgets creates, naturally, lasagna code that makes it hard to reason about this.
Can you expand on this OP? I've never had problems with `setState` nor "lasagna code" in Flutter. From a quick search I mostly seem to find questions from people who are still learning Flutter and getting basic things wrong.

by chaosprint

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by rossant

2 subcomments

I really like the immediate mode GUI (IMGUI) paradigm. The other day, I looked into whether any web-based IMGUI libraries existed. It seems that HTML and the DOM are designed so differently from IMGUI that such an approach doesn't really make sense, unfortunately, unless everything is rendered manually in a canvas, WebGL, or WebGPU, which brings its own set of challenges.

by airstrike

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I feel obliged to mention that iced is a fantastic Rust GUI library for more complex applications:
https://iced.rs

by wdroz

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I also prefer the mental model of immediate mode, but when I played with Dioxus[0] for a rust fullstack hobby project[1], I was able to adapt.
I liked the DX with the tools and the `rsx!` macro. The use of `#[cfg(feature = "server")]` to define server-side code is interesting, it lets you keep a shared codebase for frontend and backend, while still controlling what gets compiled to WASM for the client.
[0] -- https://dioxuslabs.com/
[1] -- https://blazingboard.ch/ (not mobile friendly, sorry)

by feverzsj

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by kjuulh

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I actually wanted to ask you about this at our last meetup (Rust Aarhus), so nice to see it on hackernews. It did seem you switched away from flutter. ;)
How is shipping egui apps vs flutter. I'd imagine that especially shipping a rust integration with Flutter might be a bit of a pain

by blu3h4t

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by jeden

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please compile Your egui program and check:
valgrind --leak-check=full --show-reachable=yes --track-origins=yes -s ./your_program
is memory leak?

by rubymamis

2 subcomments