Building a fast Electron app with Rust
I really like where the author went with this. Everytime I read something like this though I can&#x27;t help but think how we as developers really need a better low level, UI framework for cross platform applications. What the author has done here is a cool idea, but ultimately this still feels flawed, and like it&#x27;s a workaround to the difficulties of writing a cross platform UI. Everytime I read something like this I can&#x27;t help but think about how great a low level, cross platform C (or C ABI) library would be (think something like libuv but for UIs). Such a library would abstract away the OS specific system calls of the UI while still providing the ability to easily do things like:
* Create a window
* Draw to the screen
* Declaratively (i.e. html like) add UI widgets to a scene
* Apply CSS like styling (like QML, JavaFX, or XAML)
* Use native file dialogs, menus, notifications, etc
* Statically link as a single dependency<p>I don&#x27;t even think something like this necessarily needs to provide native UI elements, rather it just needs to be a more performant, easier to use, smaller, version of electron that could easily be used from any language. It needs to provide common UI elements like buttons, textboxes, divs, grid layouts, etc, but judging by the popularity of electron - I don&#x27;t think those necessarily need to use native elements.<p>Qt is close to this, but it feels heavyweight and in my opinion its biggest flaw is that it&#x27;s difficult to link to an application and setup a development environment for. Tk is kind of like this, but way too limited. JavaFX is a really good example, and would be perfect if it wasn&#x27;t Java only (same with WPF but it&#x27;s C# only). Right now the closest attempt to something like this that I know of is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;andlabs&#x2F;libui" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;andlabs&#x2F;libui</a><p>I think libui could even be a starting point for such a library, but the library I&#x27;m thinking of would need some type of declarative UI support (i.e. html like, maybe even support for a subset of html), built in support for styling, and less of a focus on using native widgets. I really wish somebody would build something like this.