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?

  • Michael Murphy (S76)English
    27•7 months ago

    GNOME was focusing on building Rust bindings for GTK for many years before Qt development picked up. The GTK bindings were usable within a year or two after Rust’s 1.0 release. Yet even today, those looking to build applications in Rust will find that GTK is the only mature toolkit right now. And if you’re doing that today, I’d recommend starting with Relm4 for the best GTK Rust experience.

    Rust does not support the C++ ABI, and Qt does not provide a C interface, so much work has to be done on building the tooling for binding C++ libraries to Rust. That work is still ongoing, so some have opted to use QML instead of interfacing with Qt C++ libraries. Yet if you’re looking to use Qt or QML, you may as well use Slint instead. It’s developed by former Qt/Trolltech developers and has a similar approach as QML.