I've developed a Gtk GUI in Rust recently. It wasn't bad, but I probably won't use it ever again. When I'm debugging a UI, I want to right-click it, select Inspect, and be able to tweak everything live.
DevTools is such a force multiplier, that I'm confident I can quickly and reliably develop a whole GUI from scratch, with custom layout animations and bells and whistles using JS+CSS. I have zero confidence in doing anything in Gtk or Cocoa beyond dumping static pre-built controls in a window. The cycle of editing blindly, recompiling, and re-running is the old paradigm that I don't want to return to.
Seems to me like the future could well be TS/Electron with bindings to Rust for system-level high perf activities. Let the UI scripting language and mature rendering platform do the UI scripting and rendering, and let the high performance systems programming language do the performance-critical system interfacing.
For example, in vscode we do almost everything in TS, but shell out to ripgrep for workspace text search.
This is what some people have started doing, and it works well as long as your bottleneck lives outside of the UI itself. But for some highly complex apps, web layout itself can become the bottleneck, and that's really hard to work around. VSCode is an absolute miracle in this regard, but it uses lots of dirty tricks under the hood to accomplish that.
Great, here is an off topic quick feedback to someone from VSCode, in what concerns search I always end up starting notepad++ Ctrl-Shif-F, get what I was searching for, meanwhile VSCode just keeps showing its increasing blue line without any results to show up.
Which is quite disappointing, given ripgrep's reputation in search performance.
I've developed a Gtk GUI in Rust recently. It wasn't bad, but I probably won't use it ever again. When I'm debugging a UI, I want to right-click it, select Inspect, and be able to tweak everything live.
DevTools is such a force multiplier, that I'm confident I can quickly and reliably develop a whole GUI from scratch, with custom layout animations and bells and whistles using JS+CSS. I have zero confidence in doing anything in Gtk or Cocoa beyond dumping static pre-built controls in a window. The cycle of editing blindly, recompiling, and re-running is the old paradigm that I don't want to return to.