Bindings/

GUI development in Rust is still young, and hard issues like accessibility and platform-nativeness are still a work in progress. Using bindings to GUI frameworks/libraries written in other languanges allows you to access more established ecosystems, while still developing your application in Rust.

There are many possibilities here, as can be seen by the list of external framework bindings below, but if you have decided to go this route, we currently recommend GTK because of their huge community, and its ability to provide a fairly native UI on desktop platforms, especially on Linux.

  • glfw crates.io
    GLFW3 bindings and idiomatic wrapper for Rust.
    opengl vulkan windowing
    Updated Downloads License Rust Version
    9 weeks ago (published 11y ago) ~735,000 (60,000 recent) Apache-2.0 1.56
    repo docs
  • imgui crates.io
    High-level Rust bindings to dear imgui
    Updated Downloads License Rust Version
    1.4 years ago (published 10y ago) ~808,000 (44,000 recent) MIT OR Apache-2.0 --
    repo docs
  • flutter_rust_bridge crates.io
    Flutter/Dart <-> Rust binding generator, feature-rich, but seamless and simple
    bindings code-generation dart ffi flutter
    Updated Downloads License Rust Version
    13 weeks ago (published 4y ago) ~3,000,000 (676,000 recent) MIT 1.70.0
    repo docs
  • fltk crates.io
    Rust bindings for the FLTK GUI library
    gui toolkit ui user-interface widgets
    Updated Downloads License Rust Version
    22 hours1 minute 79284 seconds ago (published 6y ago) ~1,000,000 (148,000 recent) MIT 1.67
    repo docs
  • tk (Tk) crates.io
    Rust bindings for Tk GUI library
    binding gui tcl tk
    Updated Downloads License Rust Version
    1.7 years ago (published 6y ago) ~20,000 (2,000 recent) MIT/Apache-2.0 --
    repo docs
  • lvgl crates.io
    LVGL bindings for Rust. A powerful and easy-to-use embedded GUI with many widgets, advanced visual effects (opacity, antialiasing, animations) and low memory requirements (16K RAM, 64K Flash).
    graphical_interfaces littlevgl lvgl
    Updated Downloads License Rust Version
    3 years ago (published 5y ago) ~20,000 (2,000 recent) MIT --
    repo docs

GTK

Qt

  • cxx-qt (CXX-Qt) crates.io
    Safe interop between Rust and Qt
    cxx ffi qml qt
    Updated Downloads License Rust Version
    2 days12 hours ago (published 4y ago) ~36,000 (7,000 recent) MIT OR Apache-2.0 --
    repo docs
  • qmetaobject crates.io
    Expose rust object to Qt and QML.
    qmetaobject qml qt
    Updated Downloads License Rust Version
    1.9 years ago (published 7y ago) ~86,000 (5,000 recent) MIT --
    repo docs

SDL

  • sdl2 crates.io
    SDL2 bindings for Rust
    api engine graphics sdl windowing
    Updated Downloads License Rust Version
    12 weeks ago (published 11y ago) ~2,000,000 (259,000 recent) MIT --
    repo docs
  • sdl3 crates.io
    Cross-platform multimedia
    audio cross-platform engine graphics input
    Updated Downloads License Rust Version
    3 weeks ago (published 2y ago) ~82,000 (29,000 recent) MIT --
    repo docs