Rust-Tailored Slint GUI Toolkit Adding Python API

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Rust-Tailored Slint GUI Toolkit Adding Python API

Some Phoronix readers have been interested in Slint as a Rust-focused graphical toolkit that offers a royalty-free license and in addition to desktop ambitions has also been porting to Android. Slint 1.5 was released today and in addition to the Rust programming language support has begun offering a Python API...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Slint-1.5-Adds-Python-API

[mxan]

Sounds cool but their licensing situation is somehow more annoying than even Qt’s, so I sense a lot of projects will simply ignore this and use Iced instead if they want a pure rust toolkit. System76 picking Iced has given it a lot of clout.

[uid313]

I think it would be better to use LGPL (or MIT) instead of GPL for libraries. I like GPL for application software, but I dislike it for libraries.

[and.elf]

Yes, the licensing is so weird.
I tried pushing lvgl to use slint as frontend.. let's say they didn't like the idea, being MIT-users themselves.
(A work, I'm currently working on a qml-lvgl transpiler. Hopefully it will be open-sourced. Not too sure, though)

[fitzie]

their licensing strategy is to push people to commercial terms. that's fine because there's just not a lot of good options in rust land these days. but that will not be true forever. I suspect that the framework that zed has put together, might be spun out into it's own effort. I kinda wished that servo focused on a toolkit too. there is a ton of overlap between a browser and a ui toolkit.

[kpedersen]

Python bindings tend to be quite viral. Searching Google for i.e wxWidgets, OpenCV, etc often comes up with some random (often unofficial) Python bindings that are fairly rotten and out of date.

Even more weird, it tends to come in waves on Google, it is there one week but gone the next. At the moment, it is quite calm but the bots could index another API docs any day now.

So, most people likely already know this but including -python in your search, greatly cleans up the results. I.e

wxButton -python

.

[tobias]

Sounds cool but their licensing situation is somehow more annoying than even Qt’s, so I sense a lot of projects will simply ignore this and use Iced instead if they want a pure rust toolkit. System76 picking Iced has given it a lot of clout.

What is annoying about it? If you want to write free software, run with GPL and use it everywhere you want to. If you want to pay: Get a commercial license and use it everywhere.

If you are in neither group: Use the royalty free license and use Slint everywhere but on embedded devices. The royalty free license is as close to MIT as possible while adding the restriction not to use Slint on embedded.

Well, that was the idea:-)

[rmfx]

Sounds cool but their licensing situation is somehow more annoying than even Qt’s, so I sense a lot of projects will simply ignore this and use Iced instead if they want a pure rust toolkit. System76 picking Iced has given it a lot of clout.

S76 said they hesitated between Iced and Slint but ended up picking Iced because it was more advanced at the time, and very straightforward to bind to libcosmic, but that they liked Slint too, and considered it as a potential second backend for libcosmic.

[ssokolow]

Python bindings tend to be quite viral. Searching Google for i.e wxWidgets, OpenCV, etc often comes up with some random (often unofficial) Python bindings that are fairly rotten and out of date.

Umm... PyOpenCV is official enough that the official docs.opencv.org Doxygen docs include the Python version of each function signature below the C++ one, and wxPython saw a new release just nine months ago. Were you perhaps thinking about the period between 2010 and 2017 when there was a bit of a GCC/EGCS dynamic where Project Phoenix wound up becoming the official wxPython 4, similar to how EGCS got blessed as GCC 3?

[kpedersen]

Umm... PyOpenCV is official enough that the official docs.opencv.org Doxygen

I didn't mention PyOpenCV. I didn't want to add to the viral python noise