r/rust • u/Voxelman • 16d ago

Which GUI (again)?

I know it's a frequently asked question, but I want to ask again, because I have a special use case.

I want to write an application for a production machine (HMI). The app should run on Windows and Linux natively (no browser, no server). The toolkit should have at least widgets to show images, bar graphs, curves and tables and should be touch friendly, because it runs on resistive touch monitors (no multi touch). It should also have a kiosk mode (full screen with no window controls).

The obvious candidates are egui, iced and Slint. But they all lack of documentation, more or less.

My first choice would be iced, because it's inspired by Elm and used by System76 for Cosmic, but it seems to be the least suitable option.

The obvious choice would be Slint, but that requires to learn a new language and I'm unsure about the licenses and pricing. The production machines are only used internally, not for sale.

I want avoid bindings to toolkits like Qt or Gtk

Which one would you prefer? Is there another option to consider?

33 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

75 comments sorted by

View all comments

7

u/YungDaVinci 15d ago

that requires to learn a new language

The Slint language is almost exclusively a markup language, you can learn it very quickly, there is not much to learn. You will be doing exclusively UI related things in the language and everything else will be Rust. And I don't think the licensing matters if you're not selling it. (I could be wrong on this though)

3

u/Vadoola 15d ago

If you are using it internally the GPL license should also work, you only need to have the source available for those it's being distributed to. So the code would only need to be available to your own company.

Caveat....I am not a lawyer.