Hearing more about Pop!_OS’s under-development Cosmic DE (in TwiL 215) got me pretty excited and prompted quite a few thoughts I’m sharing here:
For some time now I’ve been feeling disappointed by both of the main cross-platform GUI toolkits. Gtk because they keep removing features, and Qt because their licensing became (even more) confusing when Covid was at its worst. wxWidgets seems to update far less frequently and I’m not sure if under-the-hood it’s dependent on Gtk, so how will Gtk4 affect wxWidgets?
I’ve been wondering when we might get a lower-level, more modern cross-platform GUI toolkit and iced seems really cool from that perspective. Besides being relatively modern, the fact that its for Rust is outstanding, in my opinion.
With so many security issues (recently hardware based) becoming increasingly common, anything that can help, (even if indirectly) at the language level seems welcome news to me. I don’t think C is going to disappear completely, possibly ever, but Rust does seem like an extremely useful language for potential low-level coding e.g. for the Linux kernel. It’s why I’m also really interested in the new Rust-based OS that’s being developed, Redox.
Some way down the line, is Fuchsia going to make Android with its Linux kernel start looking slow and outdated? Could a new Rust-based OS be the basis for better competition?