A 2026 Survey of Rust GUI Libraries
On August 8, 2026, a survey of Rust GUI libraries was conducted, focusing on several projects. One library, Azul, introduced Azul Workspace, Azul UI Toolkit, and Azil OS. However, due to a lack of font compatibility and editor support, Azul was ruled out for this purpose. Blinc, a new Rust GUI framework, uses wgpu as its rendering backend and adopts a reactive programming model.
Despite some unfinished components and macOS accessibility issues, Blinc showed promise. Cacao, a Rust binding for macOS AppKit, surprised the author with its clean API, but its screen reader functionality was lacking. Core Foundation, not a GUI library per se, was also used for bindings in this project. Crux, previously only having mobile bindings, now offers macOS bindings, making it suitable for the survey.
The author followed Crux's documentation to set up the project scaffold, noting the increased complexity due to the lack of desktop bindings.
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