Sure, there's "native" UI with stuff like slint(QT-like) or iced(system76 is actually building the COSMIC linux desktop environment with this).
And you can also get an electron-like stack going, that is actually much less bloated than "normal" electron, by using tauri-webview, which uses the OS-provided webview and combining it with one of the many cool rust WASM-based reactive web-ui frameworks, like leptos or dioxus.
This gets you compiled sizes of ~10s of MB compared to electrons 100s of MBs.
There's also bindings to a lot of traditional ui libs, like GTK, QT & Tk.
I'm currently going for the 2nd option (with leptos for the web part) as I'm used to the web-stack and am very productive with this approach, but native UI also seems very tempting to dig into further.
I can personally vouch for Slint. The DSL is very pleasant to work with, it's still evolving (and the devs are very active and responsive), tooling is also getting better and better each release and it supports translations and accessibility already (through AccessKit). I've been (veeeery) slowly working on a Matrix client with it and I've quite enjoyed it so far.
Hey that is really cool thank you. I have Sublime as my IDE, and it looks like I can use that as well, and using a webview might leverage my understanding of webtech.
And you can also get an electron-like stack going, that is actually much less bloated than "normal" electron, by using tauri-webview, which uses the OS-provided webview and combining it with one of the many cool rust WASM-based reactive web-ui frameworks, like leptos or dioxus. This gets you compiled sizes of ~10s of MB compared to electrons 100s of MBs.
There's also bindings to a lot of traditional ui libs, like GTK, QT & Tk.
I'm currently going for the 2nd option (with leptos for the web part) as I'm used to the web-stack and am very productive with this approach, but native UI also seems very tempting to dig into further.
Some related links:
- https://www.arewewebyet.org/topics/frameworks/
- https://areweguiyet.com/#ecosystem