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rust·Rustbyvan2z

What popular crates are available to build GUIs with widgets WITHOUT GPU?

For some reason, it seems popular for GUI crates to use the GPU. I just want to make simple widgets, for like a calculator.

No fancy graphics. I want it quite lightweight.

For some reason, popular GUI crates love to do everything through a GPU, which bumps up the memory / cpu use significantly.

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RunAwayFrog
sh.itjust.works

Funny you should mention that. I think iced as of four days ago can do this!

If I'm reading the release notes and Cargo.toml right, cargo add iced --no-default-features and you should be good to go, as tiny-skia will be used as a rendering backend instead of wgpu.

13
van2zreply
programming.dev

OMG, thank you! I have been using Iced. My simple application's RAM just went down from 80 MB to only 4 MB.

The executable size went down from about 8 MB to 2.5 MB

13
hch12907reply
programming.dev

8MB to 2.5MB is a huge drop. I wonder what caused the bloat - a crate?

3
Tobias Hunger
programming.dev

Slint fits the bill: We have a demo running on a line-buffer in a microcontroller with <300KiB of RAM. Framebuffers are of course supported as well, as is GPU-accelerated rendering.

11
BB_Creply
lemm.ee

Did you tick "Bot Account" by accident?

4
Tobias Hungerreply
programming.dev

I did tick that, since I saw text boxes and went "give me everything" without reading:-)

Fixed. Thank you for pointing this out.

4
spikespazreply
programming.dev

You have much to learn Young Padawan. If you're wanting to make a desktop app in Rust it behooves one to avoid embedded web environments. For performance reasons of course.

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