Re:First Rust Code Shows Up in the Windows 11 Kernel
by criddell on Saturday May 13, 2023 @07:13AM
(#35927295)
How’s Rust for desktop application development? Are there frameworks like MFC or ATL or WTL or WinRT? Is COM development or using UWP significantly more difficult in Rust than C++ or C#?
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Re:First Rust Code Shows Up in the Windows 11 Kernel
by jenadine on Saturday May 13, 2023 @07:30AM
(#35927383)
There are ok bindings to some toolkits such as Qt and Gtk, which are the most mature right now.
But there is promising progress also in full rust GUI libraries for example Slint or egui
Re:First Rust Code Shows Up in the Windows 11 Kernel
by criddell on Saturday May 13, 2023 @07:48AM
(#35927471)
I should have mentioned I’m only interested in native Windows APIs. I want to use UWP features, lots of COM (both as client and server), etc…
I see Microsoft has done some work and there’s a Windows crate, but I’m not seeing IDL support for COM and it looks like you end up with a ton of unsafe blocks. It makes me wonder if a programmer who sticks with smart pointers in C++ is all that much worse off than a Rust developer on Windows?
Re:First Rust Code Shows Up in the Windows 11 Kernel
by serentty on Saturday May 13, 2023 @09:10AM
(#35928027)
There is a lot more to Rust than just “safety”. That gets talked about a lot, but Rust is full of great features that make it worthwhile to use even when you are working in unsafe Rust.
On top of that, it should still be possible to write the application logic in safe Rust, even if you need to use unsafe for FFI with Windows stuff.