> I want to (1) build blindingly fast, low-latency, super performant UX for users, … (2) maintain developer velocity, (3) have access to nice UX primitives and widgets … (4) have it look nice and modern.

Find me when you find this, because I actually think it is impossible.

I think there is fundamentally too much inherent complexity to abstract away to keep 2 and not sacrifice 1. Specifically for something properly cross platform.

If you are only targeting MacOS or windows then I think it’s absolutely possible but then you are using the wrong language, nothing against rust at all on that, the platform defaults are just swift / C# for those use cases.

And I’m not sure but unless you are just using a gtk/Qt style framework you would absolutely run into a11y problems that you would need to build around yourself.

Sounds like you probably want egui though… if your primary UI is a big canvas that needs to be hardware accelerated and interaction is just to assist that use case egui is probably a good bet for you. But you wouldn’t be hiring web devs to do that.

I'm no UX expert, but I regularly try out new (and old) toolkits to understand the problem space.

It really sounds like you want an immediate mode toolkit. Retained mode will never be "super-snappy", there's an entire sandwich between your code and the pixels. Look at Blender or Reaper, this is the kind of "feel" you'd be getting.

If you want retained mode + "true" native widgets on all platforms, investigate: Toga (Python), WxWidgets (C++), and Tk (Tcl). The native toolkits are often best in class on each platform, and these wrappers are about as thin as they can reasonably get (e.g. Toga uses pyobjc). Integration with Rust is left as an exercise to the reader ;)

A rich widget library is nice, but consider the depth as well. Egui went to great lengths to integrate assistive technologies, which depending on your target audience may be impactful. (Also: accessibility is for everyone. https://shortcat.app/)

If you want easy hiring, you have to go with mainstream. We've +/- named all of the options by now. Otherwise, hire a talent who's worked on the next closest thing to what you're building, and trust them to decide the direction.

Looks and beauty are in the eye of the beholder. There are many apps that have a distinct, sometimes quirky, but appreciable style. Reaper looks out of place on every platform, but I prefer it over Logic or Ableton.

I'm super biased in favor of iced.

Yes, there are missing features (it's not even version 1.0 yet!) but I think the number is very small now and the solution is usually to fill in the gaps yourself—which is possible because iced is totally modular

I've made a spreadsheet editor and a slideshow editor with it so "slimmed down photoshop" seems feasible although admittedly you will likely need to get deep into the renderer (possibly write your own renderer traits and there), but I suppose you're comfortable with that given your goal.

If you're not allergic to Discord, come join us. It's a helpful, awesome tight community IMHO

Link for the lazy: https://discord.gg/3xZJ65GAhd

Project link: https://iced.rs

I know it’s usually taken as a given around here that Electron is slow, and many of the big-name apps using it are cited as examples with good reason.

From working on a Tauri app myself for a few years (video editor) I just think the blame is misattributed. These things are not inherently slow. Slower than native? Maybe, probably, at the level of milliseconds. Visibly laggy? No, that’s the badly-written UI code’s fault. (see also: the latest iterations of the macOS System Settings UI, where the search box lags like crazy)

A webview can be extremely responsive. It won’t be if you treat it like a web page (where clicking buttons fires off HTTP requests) or if you let the JS framework code get out of hand, but those are not the fault of the wrapper.

If you like building with HTML/CSS/JS then I’d recommend doing some perf experiments to see how far these tools can take you. Of course if you don’t want to use that stack then pick something else :)

If you’re building photoshop, the main UI will probably be canvas anyway, where drawing is fully under your control, no matter which framework you go with. That stuff can be very fast or very not-fast depending on how the code is written.

Slint recently added Bevy support. I’ve been keeping an eye on it since I’ve used Qt and love working in Qml.

Makepad is neither gtk generation nor browser based. Might check the "just text/button widget" box though, I'd certainly place it on the minimalistic end of the spectrum. (haven't worked with makepad, just enjoyed the demo)

> Is Dioxus (or Leptos) much more performant than Tauri/Electron?

For now it's largely the same. Both Dioxus and Leptos render using Tauri (or a web browser). For Dioxus, a Blitz-based renderer (Dioxus Native ) is in development which will change the story slightly.

I would suggest Iced if you're looking for efficient (I don't think it's any less featureful than any other Rust-based GUI). With honourable mentions for Slint and Vizia.

Certainly not a "Rust UX _expert_", but I do find GPUI interesting. Some nice examples here of not-"just text/button widget programs": https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component

Check out https://www.gpui.rs/ too