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 Information becomes outdated quickly, so LLMs often fail to help.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

[–] dipdowel@feddit.nl 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Hi. Please take a look at Graph1. It may potentially be what you're looking for: https://graph1.codument.com/

It is designed for (simple) animated graphics projects. A considerable improvement in displaying pixel fonts is planned to be rolled out in 2-3 weeks.

[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago

Just wanted to get back to tell that I tried graph1 to mess around with non-linear projection, it seemed like an interesting crate but it felt like it's a bit too low level for doing a GUI with it.