Show HN: Rust GUI Library via Flutter

I have been using this to build an app[0] for the last couple of years and I want to say that it has been a pleasure to use, there are some wrinkles but overall I have been very happy with the experience.<p>Upgrading from v1 to v2 was not too difficult and v2 is a significant upgrade with lots of useful features, massively improved codegen experience and support for tokio async were the big gamechangers for me.<p>Writing all the app business logic in Rust and using Dart as the front-end works out really well. I know Flutter&#x2F;Dart doesn&#x27;t get much love here on HN but in my opinion I think it&#x27;s much easier to reason about than a system like React which I think is the wrong level of abstraction compared to Flutter&#x27;s render the entire widget tree approach.<p>Massive thanks to @fzyzcjy for all the work on FRB, great job!<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;saveoursecrets.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;saveoursecrets.com</a>

While I don&#x27;t see the advantage of writing UI in Rust vs Dart, I&#x27;m a huge fan of flutter_rust_bridge.<p>The work fzyzcjy and the community have put into calling Rust code from Dart seamlessly is such an asset to Flutter apps. I remade the popular image compression app ImageOptim in Flutter over a weekend because webp wasn&#x27;t supported. After a little pain in the initial setup, I was able to call mature Rust image libraries using flutter_rust_bridge and a small wrapper[0]. It even handled all the parallelism for me.<p>The app ended up being more capable and faster than ImageOptim, largely just because of the Rust integration. Thank you fzyzcjy!<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;blopker&#x2F;alic&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;rust&#x2F;src&#x2F;api&#x2F;compressor.rs">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;blopker&#x2F;alic&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;rust&#x2F;src&#x2F;api&#x2F;compr...</a>

Commendable effort! I’m currently using Tauri for a project myself and was wondering if anyone has any pros&#x2F;cons between the two?

Interesting! IIUC this is done using source-to-source translation? It is a bit hard to understand from the docs what technical approach is. The docs are clearly aimed at users and I find them impressive, well done. I&#x27;d be interested in knowing the approach and how it compares to wasm based Rust web frameworks before diving more deeply into it.<p>One advantage of combining Rust with Flutter seems to be that Flutter is a whole framework already and one would be able to share code and data structures between server and client side.<p>A comparison with other ways Rust

Well done! I&#x27;ve heard only good things about rust_flutter_bridge. Some questions though (more like flutter question), how bloated flutter is (i.e. final app size) compared to mobile native (Java, Swift?) for simple app? And how&#x27;s the UI performance looks like?

How is the a11y story with this? I did not find any info about it in the document, but I can not imagine anyone releasing a GUI kit in 2024 without extensive a11y support, so why not mention it?

I use Flutter for my desktop UI and Rust for my backend. However, I chose to separate the two using gRPC instead of the bridge. This allows me to be agnostic of language on both sides and I suspect gives me a cleaner interface for mocking the backend from my frontend. It also makes it easy to place the UI and backend on different machines giving a true client&#x2F;server architecture. The con is likely that the interface is probably more verbose, however.

Much better than reaching out to Chrome shells or Web widgets, kudos for the effort.

Nice, I really enjoyed Flutter&#x27;s approach to building UI, but I didn&#x27;t really care for Dart all that much.<p>In theory shouldn&#x27;t it be possible to create a programming language specifically for UI? Something that can be interfaced with from any major programming language. Kinda like protobuf with its IDL format, but instead of defining data, it&#x27;s declaring user interfaces. Is that a crazy or stupid idea?<p>QT and XAML come to mind, but I believe QT is closed source (might be wrong about that), and XAML seems to have been dead in the water for a long time now (also might be wrong about that).

Does anyone know if Google plans to sunset the entire Flutter framework over time? Since they fired just about everybody internal who was working on it, I don&#x27;t have a lot of confidence that Flutter will still have any Google support in 3-5 years. Has anyone talked about forking it and putting it under an independent foundation to ensure its long-term viability? Given Google&#x27;s track record of long-term support for its various technologies, it would be a shame if Flutter got consigned to history&#x27;s scrap-heap prematurely.

How does this compare to rinf?

Flutter Rust Bridge is without a doubt the best FFI bridge I‘ve ever used. It works like magic. I have no idea how it‘s done.

Does anyone know how this compares to EGUI in terms of performance, binary size, flexibility, and overall experience?

The sample with Google&#x27;s IMHO ugly material design plus confetti is not the best look.

Cool, but the point of having stuff in Rust is to ideally have everything in Rust, or you&#x27;re by definition not getting all the safety benefits of Rust.

Isn&#x27;t Flutter basically a way to use the C++ render engine from Chrome, with a &quot;scripting&quot; language most similar to Kotlin and Swift?<p>Why not just use the Chrome render engine directly from Rust?<p>Why all the extra steps?