I can’t figure out which crate(s) I should be using to create GUI applications. I only want to create simple 2D games like Conway’s Game of Life, so I don’t need anything fancy. At most I would like to be able to easily create polygons.
I’ve already looked at Are we game yet?, but it would be a waste of time to learn 20 different crates in order to decide on which one to use. Bevy is far too heavy and doesn’t even work if you are low on memory. SDL3 isn’t natively supported without some workarounds (but SDL2 is fine). Winit tries to use insecure X11 unless I manually add it as a dependency with the Wayland feature. I plan to eventually learn GTK4+Adwaitta, but that’s unnecessary for simple games.
GUI in Rust seams like a mess. There’s so many crates ranging from simple to complicated. Information becomes outdated quickly, so LLMs often fail to help. There’s few clear comparisons between crates to help you decide, so it becomes a headache. I’m just looking for a modern, safe, easy, minimal GUI crate.
Does anyone have any advice?
The IRC client, Halloy uses iced.rs and that is a very beautiful client. Also, the upcoming Cosmic Desktop major version uses Iced as well. So that maybe a good indicator where efforts are heading.
Not my area of expertise, but egui may suit your use-case better than the usual candidates.
The title seems a bit confusing. Do you want a game library, or a GUI library?
Assuming you’re doing game dev, bevy is probably the furthest along, though there are a few alternatives. You can enable only the features and plugins you need to lower the memory footprint, though it’s not clear to me how low of memory you’re looking for.
As far as I know, everything uses winit. If you need the feature enabled, you can add it as a dependency directly (in Cargo.toml) and enable the feature.
If you’re having a hard time, maybe consider a completed game engine. Have you looked at Godot? Does it need to be in Rust?
GUI is just a mess. I think bevy is to-go though, it could be tuned a lot to turn down memory demand. Otherwise, use system level stuff, like web-based ui or Qt wrap.
At least that’s what I ended up thinking after struggling with same question.
I tried to build simple UI with floem, slint, and iced.
- slint seems to allow to do the most, it’s GNU GPL, and it allows you to move boilerplate to separate
*.slintfiles much like Qt, imo. - floem seemed the most flexible to me, but it requires attaching signals everywhere manually.
- iced seemed the easiest to use, but not exactly too flexible. I think some looks of the already simple UI I wanted to create were not possible there.
You can check out my repo to see if it helps to answer your question. And yeah, I know the features shouldn’t be mutually exclusive 🌚
- slint seems to allow to do the most, it’s GNU GPL, and it allows you to move boilerplate to separate
When I want to draw raw polygons, I use wgpu. When I want a GUI I used iced. And when I want both, I use wgpu+imgui.
Learning wgpu is quite steep, and it has tons of boilerplate. So unless you’re certain that you will use it a lot. I would just use iced.
When I say wgpu I mean wgpu+winit. Though winit is quite simple and light. So the main part is wgpu.
Hi. Please take a look at Graph1. It may potentially be what you’re looking for: https://graph1.codument.com/
It is designed for (simple) animated graphics projects. A considerable improvement in displaying pixel fonts is planned to be rolled out in 2-3 weeks.
Just wanted to get back to tell that I tried graph1 to mess around with non-linear projection, it seemed like an interesting crate but it felt like it’s a bit too low level for doing a GUI with it.
Currently I use WxWidgets and Cocoa for macOS.
The best would probably be pure native UI with static/dynamic library in Rust for logic. Sounds hard, but it’s the best option in my opinion.
My 2 cents is below. Your decision depends on your tasks, preferences and targets.
- GPU framework maybe fast, but accessibility at 0
- HTML backend is nice, but I can’t choice other than native, which limits me quite hard for target user base. And I don’t like JS if not strictly required (it’s a personal preference).
- GTK on macOS and windows is quite hard to install and I don’t like visuals
- QT is in grey zone if static (non-GPL project), and I haven’t found good way to bundle it if dynamic
- ImGUI is nice but I don’t know if they support HiDPI monitors and accessibility is not the highest
- fltk is nice, but 1) many things you’ll have to write by you own, rewriting sometimes from FLTK2 C++ code… and community could be more chill and friendly
- Windows Metro UI… probably no crates
- Win32 API GUI works perfect
- Swift… probably yes, but it’s very OS-dependent
- Cocoa — very nice for macOS.
- current stop is WxWidgets: small, embedded, look… ok for now.
- there’s some framework for iOS and Android, looks fine for me, but not my target ATM.
I’ve forgot slint. Same as QT
Personally I would start with plain SDL2 and then add GTK. Both of them are language-agnostic, so you are learning something that you can use in other projects too. And are widely used, so while the Rust binds might add some spiciness to the mix, it should be easier to search for clues
Slint is a cross platform one.
Iced and egui are also an option.
