What popular crates are available to build GUIs with widgets WITHOUT GPU?

For some reason, it seems popular for GUI crates to use the GPU. I just want to make simple widgets, for like a calculator.

No fancy graphics. I want it quite lightweight.

For some reason, popular GUI crates love to do everything through a GPU, which bumps up the memory / cpu use significantly.

10 comments

Funny you should mention that. I think iced as of four days ago can do this!

If I'm reading the release notes and Cargo.toml right, cargo add iced --no-default-features and you should be good to go, as tiny-skia will be used as a rendering backend instead of wgpu.
- OMG, thank you! I have been using Iced. My simple application's RAM just went down from 80 MB to only 4 MB.
  
  The executable size went down from about 8 MB to 2.5 MB
  
  8MB to 2.5MB is a huge drop. I wonder what caused the bloat - a crate?
Slint fits the bill: We have a demo running on a line-buffer in a microcontroller with <300KiB of RAM. Framebuffers are of course supported as well, as is GPU-accelerated rendering.
- Did you tick "Bot Account" by accident?
  
  I did tick that, since I saw text boxes and went "give me everything" without reading:-)
  
  Fixed. Thank you for pointing this out.
How about Tauri? https://tauri.app/
- You have much to learn Young Padawan. If you're wanting to make a desktop app in Rust it behooves one to avoid embedded web environments. For performance reasons of course.

10 comments