If you do it via React Native turbo modules, it is already possible, either using craby (1) or using uniffi-bindgen-react-native (2).

(1) https://github.com/leegeunhyeok/craby

(2) https://github.com/jhugman/uniffi-bindgen-react-native

I have no idea why people would want to write UI in Rust when Swift, Kotlin and Dart are much better suited for the job.

I would love to see RustActivity in Android one day, this would make the life much easier.

I mean cross platform is just "heavy work" in general

many company literally just give up use web wrapper instead because its just so much work

+1 for Slint! I worked with it for a while and enjoyed it quite a lot. Florian was working on a more glossy compinent library, not sure what has been made of it.

The DSL was pleasant but still had some rough edges. I think they made some nice QoL improvements in the latest releases, but I've not kept up with it. The compile times were quite something, though you can use the previewer tool to prototype faster.

Definitely worth giving Slint a shot, they learnt a lot from QML imo

How does the text input work there? Does it support IME? Were you able to switch to non-latin keyboards?

Dioxus is WebView, as you've mentioned. Though there's an experimental native renderer mentioned in the README, I would keep an eye on it. And slint should be the same kind of solution as I wrote about. When building native apps for Android, there's usually an issue with text inputs. NativeActivity doesn't support IME, and GameActivity is supposed to solve this. So in case of slint, I would check how they solved the text inputs.

I left WebView based solutions out of scope. As you can see, I'm focusing on NativeActivity / GameActivity in my post. Though WebView brings you interesting options. For example, iced is inspired by Elm, and with Dioxus you can use Elm to build mobile apps.

Dioxus is a very different API model, being an implementation of the Elm architecture. It’s really comparing apples to octopuses.

Crux seems interesting to share app logic between platforms but I don't see how it helps actually render something. Don't you still need a gui framework that supports android or ios?

The Android Open Source Project is awesome. It's not hard to compile it yourself and run it on a pixel 9. The issue is the hardware imo. (And some of the apps in AOSP really suck, but the actual OS is great imo)

Account created one hour ago just to make this comment. Make it on your real account.

It doesn't, and I had to write some Java to support clipboard.

A lot of complex GUIs are written in C++ (or are thinish wrappers around an underlying toolkit that is C++). This is often for performabce and/or resource consumption reasons. UIs may not have hard realtime requirements, but they are expected to consistently run smoothly at 60fps+. And dealong with multiple screen sizes, vector graphics, univode text,r etc can involve a lot of computation.

Rust gives you the same performance as C++ with much nicer language to work with.

I don’t understand the question. Why would rust be confined to real-time applications?

It turns out it is worth the effort. Once you have got past the "fighting the borrow checker" (which isn't nearly as bad as it used to be thanks to improvements to its abilities), you get some significant benefits:

* Strong ML-style type system that vastly reduces the chance of bugs (and hence the time spent writing tests and debugging).

* The borrow checker really wants you to have an ownership tree which it turns out is a really good way to avoid spaghetti code. It's like a no-spaghetti enforcer. It's not perfect of course and sometimes you do need non-tree ownership but overall it tends to make programs more reliable, again reducing debugging and test-writing time.

So it's more effort to write the code to the point that it will compile/run at all. But once you've done that you're usually basically done.

Some other languages have these properties (especially FP languages), but they come with a whole load of other baggage and much smaller ecosystems.