Why are there so many (rust) GTK apps and so little Qt ones?

Pantherina@feddit.de to Linux@lemmy.ml – 83 points –

I always see new GTK apps popup on Flathub. I dont really care and think GTK looks fancy, although CSD suck a bit and they waste space and often functionality.

But they work, are solid, and do what they should.

Qt on the other hand may seem more like a complex job to code with. I dont actually think so, but I heard especially writing rust with GTK is way better than with Qt.

I like KDE a lot, and even though I am excited for Cosmic I think Qt is the better toolkit for many things and a lot of time. But Dolphin seems to suffer from memory safety issues all the time, as well as other projects.

Do you have experience in rust, using GTK or Qt? How do they compare?

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GTK is in bare C, which is rather easy to interop with Rust. Even if using GLib from Rust is a pain, GTK can and does have decent Rust bindings.

QT on the other hand is C++ with object oriented stuff, and therefore cannot have easy bindings to Rust.

Could you explain C bindings in Rust to a nonprogrammer? Does this mean GTK can't use Rust natively, at least for the interface?

Bindings are like translations of the relevant C code to Rust so they can use Rust to talk (interop) with the C library instead of having to use C.

Does this mean GTK can’t use Rust natively, at least for the interface?

I never used GTK, but I suppose from this conversation that yes.