Re:Rust in the Android Platform
by carlhjerpe on Tuesday April 06, 2021 @10:57PM
(#26720107)
What prevents Rust(as a language) from being used to write UI? Qt is implemented in C++, which rust seems to aim to replace.
Rust seems like an excellent contender for the future.
The borrow checker.
UIs tend to have designs that require graph based structures and self referencial references, so in the end you get either lots of Rc<RefCell<>> and clone() calls, or have to bind the whole stack to fit into Rust's memory model.
Have a look at,
https://raphlinus.github.io/rust/druid/2019/10/31/rust-2020....
https://raphlinus.github.io/rust/druid/2020/09/28/rust-2021....
Re:Rust in the Android Platform
by steveklabnik on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @12:40AM
(#26720668)
Many UI toolkits use shared ownership and callbacks, and that's annoying in Rust. Some bindings make it work. There's a bunch of folks working on interesting architectures. But the classic styles just clash with Rust's default way of doing things.
Re:Rust in the Android Platform
by throwaway189262 on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @12:06AM
(#26720488)
Multi threading sanely requires Arc, and reference counting is a crappy form of GC.
If you have enough threads passing stuff around and can deal with the ~50% performance loss between Java and Rust, it's much easier to use a language with GC.
There's talk of adding a quality GC to rust and dedicated GC types. If/when that happens, Rust will be a contender for a bunch of higher level systems
Rust is not a UI programming language and shouldn't be.
but writing your own native modules in rust might be fun (VR, Audio processing, AI ...)