Relm4 makes developing beautiful cross-platform applications idiomatic (relm4.org)

I used plain gtk-rs for my last project and there is definitely some friction between rust and the gobject system. I think for my next project I will give relm4 a try. Apparently you can always drop back to gtk-rs if needed.

Reading the documentation, I just notice lots of familiarity with my own solution using haskell and gi-gtk4. I think that anybody that read https://bichanna.github.io/posts/tea-time/ will get the same ideas. This basically boils down to:

1. Use a native widget system such as GTK (I evaluated Qt too)

2. Wrap widgets into a component datatype that is aware on how to update the widget when the props/model changes.

3. Define a dispatch closure that is passed to widget that accepts messages. Actions on the widgets should use this instead of mutating a reference.

4. That dispatch closure is component aware and it will call the update function on all the widgets.

There are some extra complications for long running computations but the model is a good base to build on. I wish the best to the relm team, most likely I will use them when programminmg in rust.

> Built on GTK, Relm4 runs on bare metal with no additional runtime in between.

So, not native in the sense of using or even resembling the native UI toolkit.

Why no examples of how "beautiful" this library is?

This is Gnome/GTK, not cross-platform like I would have expected. A Linux-first approach. I’m happy that this is the world we’re in now but expect it still to be royal pain to get a build running on Windows. Huge congrats to everyone involved if not!

I had to read the comments to figure out whether this was AI or not. I guess that's a sign of the times...