I think the Rust community is sleeping on the potential of iced for traditional desktop gui. I monitor the gui space in Rust closely and have seen many toolkits come and go. In my opinion a desktop gui library/framework needs to solve two things to be useful: architecture and advanced widgets.

egui has served me well and is eagerly recommended in "what gui should I use" threads since it solves the widget problem well in an easy-to-use package. However, any sufficiently advanced application ends up needing a nice architecture to maintain development speed and enjoyment. I've found whether using egui/slint/fltk/etc. you end up having to roll your own system. When you start needing things like undo/redo you suspiciously start architecting something that smells like the elm architecture.

Iced is the only Rust toolkit that I track that solves the architecture part upfront. The message pattern is hugely powerful but it is hard to appreciate until you've really gotten in the weeds on larger applications. Once iced reaches a point where there is an advanced set of widgets available I suspect its popularity will rise accordingly.

As a comparison, one of the most successful desktop gui toolkit of all times (Qt Widgets) solved the architecture/widget duality long ago with the signal/slot system and advanced widgets like treeviews, datagrid, etc. Since then we must have had hundreds of "desktop" toolkits across all languages that can draw buttons and dropdowns but nobody has toppled the king yet for building advanced desktop GUIs (although there were a few close competitors in C# with WPF and Java with Swing they only solved the widget part in my opinion). I like to think iced can take this mantle one day, best of luck to them and congrats on the 0.14 release.

For anyone curious about accessibility support, looks like it's a WIP with contributions from System76 staff <3 https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/issues/552

And TIL about AccessKit https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

I recently started to get an interest in writing a GUI with Rust. In particular, a database GUI.

Initially, I thought Tauri with Svelte. Then I learned about gpui (https://www.gpui.rs/) and I'm intrigued.

TIL about iced, which seems to have been around for a while.

Before I embark on building a prototype UI for my app with all three libraries, does anyone have hands-on experience they can share?

I've got a stagnating Python Qt app prototype that I need to actually write properly. It's a personal project so I can do that without affecting users. I need to decide between Rust and Iced or stick with Python and Qt.

Python has a VLC library that embeds VLC behind the scenes for audio playback, and Qt had facility to work with it. This is terrific as I need to support a wide variety of codecs (voice recordings) and I need to change playback speed during playback. Does Rust or Iced have such capability to embed VLC? Not the VLC UI elements, just to use VLC behind the scenes.

Iced is a wonderful dead-simple framework. I hope it forever maintains the simplicity which combines nicely with Rust’s features.

One thing I love about Iced and miss in Qt is writing the software in a single language. Qt has chosen to introduce multiple languages into their framework which makes the entire codebase a huge learning curve. In Qt you write your display layer in QML then your UI logic in Javascript and any backend advanced logic in C++. It is frankly exhausting.

In Iced you write in Rust and use Cargo packages. This gives the developer ultimate composability and clarity of their application as well as powerful tools from an established ecosystem. If Qt wanted to provide a powerful Qml tool, they have to write it and build all of the IDE integration.

For the record Qt used to be moving in a pure C++ direction but that changed when Qml came onto the scene.

The COSMIC DE (by System76, default in Pop_OS distro) is written using their iced fork, which hopefully will be upstreamed eventually.

Repo: https://github.com/iced-rs/iced

I use Halloy, one of the applications featured in the readme, on the regular. It's great and the UI is very pleasant. I don't enjoy writing rust and very much wish someone would port iced to other languages.

Inspired by The Elm Architecture, Iced expects you to split user interfaces into four different concepts:

State — the state of your application

Messages — user interactions or meaningful events that you care about

View logic — a way to display your state as widgets that may produce messages on user interaction

Update logic — a way to react to messages and update your state