Speaking as an outsider, I have been watching Rust very closely for two reasons:
* I hope it will become a viable alternative to C/C++ for graphics programming. Unfortunately, last I checked as of ~6 months ago, Rust graphics libraries are still in their infancy.
* I hope it will eventually replace Electron as the go-to for multiplatform app development. IMO this cannot realistically be done by relying on native APIs / platform-specific tools like GTK, since we need something closer to functional reactive programming a la React/Svelte/SolidJS, with more emphasis on performance. If I wanted to build a GTK app, I would build a GTK app. See also [1].
I believe Rust has the potential to accomplish both goals, partially due to the design of the language, but mostly because I have faith in the very smart people who work on Rust to make good decisions in the long-term.
Care to elaborate? AFAIK C/C++ emerged as the alternative to Pascal way back when. No sense moving backwards--it's clear Rust is on track to displace several common uses for C/C++.
Just basic, stable support for OpenGL / Vulkan. My reading from ~January of this year was that there were several competing methods for graphics support in Rust. I tried a few and the boilerplate was quite a bit more than expected, and I was unsuccessful getting the available samples to run on my Linux machine.
Admittedly, I know nothing about what's actually going on behind the scenes when it comes to graphics + Rust. Just my first impressions as an outsider. I found the existing libraries quite difficult to get started with.
(I'm someone who doesn't know much Rust and is waiting for some of this functionality to mature -- someone already invested in Rust is certainly in a better position to take advantage of the existing graphics support)
Ok, in this case, I think the situation is fairly good. De-facto standard for raw Vulkan in Rust is Ash [1], and raw GL can be worked with GL-rs [2]. It's when you go higher levels where things start diverging more.
There is nothing wrong with gfx-hal. I care deeply about it, and wgpu implementation is based on top. It's just for users who need portability and performance, while Ash gives you close to raw access to Vukan.
* I hope it will become a viable alternative to C/C++ for graphics programming. Unfortunately, last I checked as of ~6 months ago, Rust graphics libraries are still in their infancy.
* I hope it will eventually replace Electron as the go-to for multiplatform app development. IMO this cannot realistically be done by relying on native APIs / platform-specific tools like GTK, since we need something closer to functional reactive programming a la React/Svelte/SolidJS, with more emphasis on performance. If I wanted to build a GTK app, I would build a GTK app. See also [1].
I believe Rust has the potential to accomplish both goals, partially due to the design of the language, but mostly because I have faith in the very smart people who work on Rust to make good decisions in the long-term.
[1] https://raphlinus.github.io/rust/druid/2020/09/25/principled...