I’ve recently started a handful of projects exploring the rust gui ecosystem and the experience has been… disappointing.

• The most mature native library I’ve seen is Druid, which is deprecated in favour of Xilem. Xilem is highly experimental.

• Slint is somehow used by several industry partners, yet is incapable of rendering flowing text documents, and only just brought in text formatting (via Xilem’s text library oddly enough).

• Egui seems a bit more capable, but it has the usual downsides of immediate mode gui without any of the typical upsides (you can’t intermingle gui elements with logic, the gui has to all go in one place).

• Dioxus is reasonably capable but is absolutely webtech focused, which seems likely anathema to Op.

• Iced I haven’t used beyond hello world, and I didn’t enjoy that experience.

AFAICT the most mature rust gui libraries are the rust bindings for C’s GTK and C++'s Qt.

I also - somewhat controversially - disagree with “very well documented”. Rust projects consistently have published API references - which is great! The actual quality of the API references is mixed. Actual documentation - such as intended usage, common patterns, design intent - are much more sparse. Of the GUI libraries I listed, only Dioxus and Slint come close.

I’ve used GTK and WxWidgets for C programs. GTK is more powerful but takes longer to get used to its idioms as I recall

Aged?

I’m pretty sure passionfruit flowers cribbed off trek here. You can’t convince me that tripod started as an organic design.

I literally cannot understand how Outlook is so awful and unpleasant to use. Constant pauses, regular freezes and a search that will show a document I sent to myself five years ago regardless of search terms but won’t surface the perfect match I received yesterday, in the world’s most prominent email client.

The only worse software I have to interact with on a daily basis is Adobe’s PDF reader, which gives me five popups within one minute of opening it and takes over a minute to do a text search in a five page document.

Typography instead of colour is used in the wild, in the Listings LaTeX package!

Ah got it. I was thinking about dense vs sparse arrays or containers

Sparse is better than dense?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35839912

Been Emulating Every Radio-frequency-handheld-supercomputer

some claim it’s the IONIQ 2, while others say it will be called the IONIQ 2.

That would be a deeply ahistorical argument.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

AI is a very old field, and has always suffered from things being excluded from popsci as soon as they are achievable and commonplace. Path finding, OCR, chess engines and decision trees are all AI applications, as are machine learning and LLMs.

That Wikipedia article has a great line in it too

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists organization views the AI effect as a worldwide strategic military threat.[4] They point out that it obscures the fact that applications of AI had already found their way into both US and Soviet militaries during the Cold War.[4]

The discipline of Artificial Intelligence was founded in the 50s. Some of the current vibe is probably due to the “Second AI winter” of the 90s, the last time calling things AI was dangerous to your funding

Came here to post this. You need a very good reason to break with Dijkstra

The jellyfin shim may only be for Jellyfin clients, not for arbitrary clients. I thought it used a generic standard but now I’m not sure.

Kodi is the closest that I know of to what you’re asking for but it definitely won’t work for everything even if you do get it behaving.

Casting to Google Cast devices is pretty locked down, but most things that can cast support a handful of different standards, so casting to other things is usually possible.

Plasma Bigscreen doesn’t have the functionality natively, but jellyfin-mpv-shim and Kodi can be cast to.

I’m using this on my HTPC. It’s currently anemic but functional. I’ve got high hopes

It’s an alternative shell for Plasma, so theoretically you should be able to do anything in it that you can do in Plasma.

On my Arch box it installed a minimal set of Plasma utilities to support it, which means my setup is still very limited (and I can’t turn off screen lock!), but I haven’t tried if it would change if offered a full Plasma install.

I can most certainly launch Steam, Kodi, Jellyfin etc.

This is the one that broke me

typedef in C just make an alias to the same type. structs have nominal typing though:

// this typedef is optional to avoid having to refer to the struct tag when referencing the types
typedef struct {int} t_0;
typedef struct {long} t_1;

t_0 test() {
  t_1 foo = {1};
  return foo; // error
}