A critical review of Xilem in 2026
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- Yesterday
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I'm surprised to hear that; I would assume GTK is pretty much as native as you can get on Linux, right? Are GTK4 components just super heavy-weight or something?
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I am thankful Xilem is still getting attention. The GUI scene in Rust is still not great. I've been eyeing Xilems development ever since Raph made his blogpost introducing it four years ago. ([Xilem: an architecture for UI in Rust](https://raphlinus.github.io/rust/gui/2022/05/07/ui-architecture.html)) I also liked his post on [Advice for the next…
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> Yet judging by the popularity of React/Electron, GUIs don't need to be maximally performant: many users are willing to accept the overhead of a (relatively fast) single-threaded GC language. The primary issue with electron+whatever bloated js framework isn't really speed, it's the memory consumption. With the current RAM prices, seeing something…
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This has been my own experience when trying to build things bottom up rather than building things driven by concrete use cases. In the past, I have noodled away at multiple game engines without a clear idea of what the game I'm trying to make is and invariably ended up with a complicated, sprawling code base that is difficult to work with and…
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> I'm partially joking and also out of my depth here, but I'm wondering if the ideal Rust GUI library is actually something like Rust wrapper→Lua framework→C bindings for your platform's GUI. That is more or less what Qt and Slint do. Qt provides QML/QtQuick and Slint has a similar approach. They both provide an HTML inspired markup + JavaScript…
- Aug 12
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> In general, we should be more willing to write code that's slightly less performant or elegant if it means that it's also less complex. This, a thousand times this. I love Rust, but the language features make it really tempting to overcomplicate your APIs by going for maximum performance. Yet judging by the popularity of React/Electron, GUIs…
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I've made concerted attempts at using xilem, and even masonry underneath it a few times and it's been pretty brutal. So I agree on pretty well the points here. The problem is there are some *really* good bits to xilem, but they're hindered badly by the experience of trying to develop something even moderately complex in it. You have to be really…
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[Helpfully](https://github.com/linebender/xilem), Xilem is "an experimental Rust architecture for reactive UI".