I would like to hear thoughts on Qt Bridges for Graphite

[Nicknamely]

I’ve been keeping an eye on Graphite for a while, and I really love what you guys are doing.

I’m pretty new to development, but I noticed the desktop app currently runs in a WebView (?). There’s nothing wrong with that at all. I was just curious if there might be another way. Lately, I’ve been interested in Qt, and while exploring, I came across Qt Bridges (docs, GitHub).

Qt Bridges is a technology that enables developers to provide application logic to Qt Quick application, by offering a new and simple API, that aim to stay as closer as possible to the host language style and principles.

Qt Bridges currently supports Rust, Java/Kotlin, C#, Swift, and Python. It looks like it lets the app’s core logic communicate directly with a QML interface. Since Graphite is already built in Rust, has the team thought about going fully “native”?

The benefits are

• QML/QtQuick
• Make the app feel more like a proper desktop app.
• Let the Rust backend talk directly to UI elements.
• Possibly save memory since there’s no browser overhead.

I get that it’s early days(?), but I’d love to hear if the devs think this could be a cool direction .

[Keavon]

There are dozens of possible UI frameworks we could theoretically use from Rust, but none of the theoreticals came close to meeting the requirements of building a production-grade DCC application GUI except either a web-based or custom-built GUI. We picked the former in the interim, with potential plans to eventually migrate to the latter. No other frameworks have yet come close to meeting the complex requirements of our use case.