Try dioxus, it has live reload but it's a work in progress.

Dioxus seems to be 'just' another way to generate HTML on the desktop. Electron but Rust? Is there a legitimate upside there?

With Dioxus, program logic compiles to native code instead of running it through a JS engine, and it ships its own HTML renderer (Blitz) instead of bundling a whole browser. So it's a lot more lightweight and performant than Electron.

As a minor bonus, the live-reload is also faster than what frameworks like React do. It truly has subsecond latency, which isn't exactly a game changer but is nice when iterating on visual details of an app.

Sounds similar to Wails. It does the same but with Go instead of Rust.

I don't think so, wails is more like tauri rather than diouxus

We now also have a custom GPU renderer (Blitz), which makes Dioxus more comparable to Flutter or the other Rust GUI toolkits (GPUI, Iced, etc).