[echelon]

> Zed is a heroic effort, but look at the code and you'll see that we still haven't figured out how to do Rust UIs.

Only a handful of apps and frameworks have figured this out. Most of the world moved onto HTML+Javascript plus Electron. Or mobile UI.

Who is using native UI in 2026? GTK and QT don't feel great.

I'm glad Zed is trying. We need more efforts.

[giancarlostoro]

I've been experimenting (thanks to Claude Code because it removes the headache drastically for me of Rust nuances, I'm not a Rust expert by any means) with Qt and Rust.

I discovered cxx-qt which is maintained by some Qt maintainers, which are all employed at KDAB. I had no idea KDAB or this project existed. It's been very smooth so far.

I can honestly say the barrier to building a GUI is very low with Claude, must to the dismay of others, but it beats me building an Electron app.

https://github.com/KDAB/cxx-qt

[pjmlp]

> Who is using native UI in 2026? GTK and QT don't feel great.

Game developers, Windows applications in .NET (possibly with some C++/COM modules)

The problem with native UIs is mostly a Year of Linux Desktop problem.

[g947o]

Let's set gaming development aside for a moment.

I believe when people talk about Rust UI, most people assume it's cross-platform. Developing an app just focused on Mac or Windows is a completely different problem. In fact, one could easily argue that you should never use Rust for those single platform apps.

[steve1977]

> Who is using native UI in 2026?

Swift. Which is similar to Rust in some ways actually.