this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2025
23 points (92.6% liked)

Rust

8026 readers
68 users here now

Welcome to the Rust community! This is a place to discuss about the Rust programming language.

Wormhole

!performance@programming.dev

Credits

  • The icon is a modified version of the official rust logo (changing the colors to a gradient and black background)

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
snowe@programming.dev
Ategon@programming.dev
EdTheLegendary@programming.dev
torcherist@programming.dev
23
Which GUI crate? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 7 months ago by Charger8232@lemmy.ml to c/rust@programming.dev
13 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I can't figure out which crate(s) I should be using to create GUI applications. I only want to create simple 2D games like Conway's Game of Life, so I don't need anything fancy. At most I would like to be able to easily create polygons.

I've already looked at Are we game yet?, but it would be a waste of time to learn 20 different crates in order to decide on which one to use. Bevy is far too heavy and doesn't even work if you are low on memory. SDL3 isn't natively supported without some workarounds (but SDL2 is fine). Winit tries to use insecure X11 unless I manually add it as a dependency with the Wayland feature. I plan to eventually learn GTK4+Adwaitta, but that's unnecessary for simple games.

GUI in Rust seams like a mess. There's so many crates ranging from simple to complicated. Information becomes outdated quickly, so LLMs often fail to help. There's few clear comparisons between crates to help you decide, so it becomes a headache. I'm just looking for a modern, safe, easy, minimal GUI crate.

Does anyone have any advice?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] calcopiritus@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago

When I want to draw raw polygons, I use wgpu. When I want a GUI I used iced. And when I want both, I use wgpu+imgui.

Learning wgpu is quite steep, and it has tons of boilerplate. So unless you're certain that you will use it a lot. I would just use iced.

When I say wgpu I mean wgpu+winit. Though winit is quite simple and light. So the main part is wgpu.