ALalestsurko·May 16, 2023
For 5 years or so, I'm watching for GUI infrastructure for my imaginary audio applications. And recently I started to develop an audio application in Rust. What I learned is that there is no a single best library in any language. Also, you shouldn't rely on anything as if it even a very popular thing at the moment it can become unmaintained very quickly. So it's better to choose a satisfying solution in what available currently and abstract it as much as possible to be able to switch to something else in the future. I also did a very simple benchmarks for GUI libraries I was interested in (instantiating 10 000 rectangles, styling them and doing layout) and the leader on macOS was the browser (Tauri) with Slint at the second place. But, unfortunately, Tauri is unusable for such kind of application because of IPC. If you need to visualize y
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our audio data, you need to continuously send it to GUI. The fastest way of communication for that would only be WebRTC, because of the sandboxing. Or you would need to go all WASM, but then you don't have access to a lot of other features you needed. As a suggestion, take another look at Qt. At very least MuseScore and Ardour use it. Also, at my opinion the most mature Rust GUI library yet is egui, not Iced. FYI, Audulus uses immediate mode GUI based on nanovg (https://github.com/audulus/vger#why). And they develop their own Rust GUI library BTW (https://github.com/audulus/rui)