A 2026 Survey of Rust GUI Libraries

I highly appreciate such try outs. Good job!

I would like to see how big a resulting stripped binary or release files are. Probably the working directory size is proportional. From my own tryouts FLTK seemed very good on this criteria (AFAIR around 1MB).

As for Floem, its UI framework, it hasn’t had a new release in nearly two years.

Would like to note that even though it did not have release, Floem is being still developed and recommendation is to use main branch. The API is quite different from last release so it's best to follow examples and docs from git, and there's an ongoing development for a major rendering rework but Floem right now is maintained by a single person so the things roll slow.

It's a good overview (of a bad situation), but I would've liked a sample application that uses a bit more of the native widget set (or their approximation). Even the tired C/F convertor would do more than that.

But, well, it seems enough stuff goes wrong with the text widget, and the trend is towards "old school"/native UIs anyways. So the ways that Tk or Qt fail here are the mote compared to the immediate/web libraries' beams.

I've been kicking the tires on a lot of these lately. A few notes:

• for anyone who is not writing zed, look at gpui-component on top of gpui, instead of just gpui itself.
• for Qt6, qtbridge-rust seemed like a better experience to me than CXX-Qt.
• ply was nice to use, but looking at the project it felt like (more than, say gpui or Qt) I really needed to be prepared to adopt and maintain it myself if I wanted to use it. But that didn't feel totally unrealistic. It's built on macroquad.

Frustrating times for desktop imho. Recently learned rust and thought learning libcosmic and iced would be a good project. Both have a “book” so I got started reading. Both project’s books end on the third substantial page. Iced was a bit worse in that it dedicates its first page to admonishing the reader to not expect anything from the developer. Noted.

A few months previously I’d tried to learn PyGTK (and gnome stuff to some degree.). Their book also ended on approximately the third page after “hello world v2”.

This is not the timeline I imagined at the dawn of the web. Desktop GUIs are near dead, and the UI/X field as well. For example, when I learned wxPython, QT, and Java Swing at the turn of the century, there were complete books in print to learn from. I’d like to buy one. (Delphi too, though was paid env.)

Also there’s been a weird and long movement towards DSL/markup files instead of code, which I don’t like. I understand code is harder at first, but it scales and compounds very well. Just like static typing. I don’t want to learn your custom language unusable anywhere else without refactoring or tool support, or requires a specific IDE.

I guess going back to something mature (read elderly) is the right call, but had wanted to move forward. There should be a better than 1999 all-around choice by now.