openSUSE Asia 2024: Developing an application for GNOME in Rust
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The document discusses the development of a GNOME application using Rust, highlighting both the challenges and advantages of GTK and Rust. Key points include the limitations of GTK, such as its outdated API and basic UI capabilities, contrasted with its wide platform support and improvements in GTK4. It also emphasizes Rust's robust type system and tooling, despite an initial steep learning curve, and introduces libadwaita and relm4 as solutions to enhance the GTK ecosystem.
openSUSE Asia 2024: Developing an application for GNOME in Rust
- 1. Developing an application for GNOME in Rust Alessio Biancalana Tokyo | November 3, 2024
- 2. わたしはだれでしょう？ Alessio Biancalana - dottorblaster - Principal Software Engineer @ SUSE - https://dottorblaster.it (Italian blog) - alessio@dottorblaster.it (E-Mail) - dottorblaster@fosstodon.org (Mastodon) - https://github.com/dottorblaster (GitHub) Alessio Biancalana - dottorblaster
- 3. Once upon a time: React
- 4. GTK is amazing… isn’t it?
- 5. Things you’ll hate about GTK - It’s pretty old - The API is very imperative - Sometimes clogged - Really un-intuitive when compared to something like React - Usual UI elements are pretty basic in their capabilities - Template files separated from actual code that orchestrates business logic
- 6. Things you’ll love about GTK - It’s everywhere - A lot of platforms supported (eg: with some portability you can run your app on a Mac or Windows) - GNOME - Elements available got really better with GTK4 - It can bind to every language, even Haskell (thanks @janvhs lol)
- 7. gtk-rs comes into play
- 8. Things you’ll hate about Rust - Other languages will give you a sense of productivity from day 1. Rust doesn’t. - You can’t outsmart the compiler - You can’t outsmart the borrow checker - You can’t outsmart clippy (the linter) - At first learning to trust the tools can be very challenging - At first learning to understand what the heck the compiler is telling you can be tricky
- 9. Things you’ll love about Rust - The type system - Error handling and optional fields - Refactoring code is a breeze - Lots of tooling - Very broad ecosystem of libraries - Unit testing is just great (more on that later) - If it compiles (there’s a broad chance) it actually works
- 10. Speedrun: libadwaita + relm4
- 11. Fixing the GTK ecosystem: libadwaita - Standard elements - Widely used in stock GNOME applications - Native feeling - Complex widgets ready to use - Honestly beautiful to see - Shared UX patterns shared across most apps, that we can reuse
- 12. Fixing the GTK ecosystem: Relm4 - Declarative UI - Split and organize your code in separate components - Everything is (potentially) reactive: just annotate it - Centralized state management - Message-passing based state updates - Lots of examples - A very nice template project
- 13. Time for some code
- 14. Relm4 advanced features - Async function calls in command spawns - Factories and vectors of factories - Conditional widgets
- 15. Shortcomings - Unit testing the view layer T_T - Nothing similar to Jest, Jest-DOM and Jest-axe assertions (for now…) - Scattered documentation - Lots of open opportunities :-) - Undocumented patterns - Even better scaffolding - Dedicated tooling
- 16. ありがとうございます !