Rune: A native GPU-rendered Rust UI framework for macOS, Windows, Linux and web

bovermyer

So it's a UI framework by agents, for agents?

ForHackernews

...what does this do? Is it just a vibecoded version of https://www.egui.rs/

geoah

Looks interesting, especially the headless part. Been building various apps lately for ios/ipados/macos for personal use and I would love something like this that would be truly cross platform. Xcode with agent use has been really nice to work with, and t3.code support for emulators has been amazing to use.

owenbrown

How should I think about this, compared to GPUI ( https://gpui.rs )? What are pros and cons?

mik3y

Sort of a digression, but it's the first time I've seen something like this: > We don't take pull requests. Have your agent open > an issue describing the bug or idea, and our agents > usually turn it around fast. Pretty interesting approach, compared to receiving a zillion potentially sloppy PRs. Open source in the age of LLMs.. ("agent source"?)

rgbrgb

> Every app can run headless, so an agent can render to PNG, dump the element tree and drive it with scripted input. This is cool. I hope SwiftUI / UIKit borrow this idea for native mac apps.

rvz

This is what a vibe coded UI framework looks like. Have a read of the clean documentation that they never wrote or read. [0] All the clean code, architecture principles thrown out of the window in favour of hundreds of code smells, anti-patterns, zero tests, and tons of unmaintainable slop. [0] https://github.com/anomalyco/rune/blob/dev/crates/rune/READM...

piker

> native GPU-rendered Rust UI Sorry, what? I feel like I've studied the Rust UI ecosystem pretty well, and the examples look nice, but if I've learned anything it's that "native" and "GPU-rendered" are oxymoronic. Likely the fonts will be fuzzy on various platforms, accessibility will be under-baked and it will land in the bucket with every other UI framework depending on winit. I like the personalities at anomaly, but I'm quite confused about what's even driving a decision to build something like this versus contributing to egui, GPUI, Iced, etc.

esafak

I was thinking "Builds and tests with a fast-moving Rust code base like this must be painful", then I noticed the total absence of tests: https://github.com/anomalyco/rune/commits/dev/

bhouston

Does this have: - Accessibility? E.g. Screen reader support? - Alternative inputs? Full keyboard support? - Full internationalization, including right-to-left and diacritics? What happens when no GPU is available? Just curious as this matters for it to be a serious library and not a proof of concept.

efficax

What does "native" mean to these people. Native UI means using the widgets provided by the operating system. This is not that.

mrpotato

Rune, the rust ui framework, not to be confused with Rune, an embeddable dynamic programming language for Rust

GaronG

It would be fun to port some apps over to this, I'm worried at the speed it moves, It would be hard to settle on a commit. I'd rather fast updates over slow, but I feel like I'd have very little trust on this between updates, especially how many things could be broken after updating.

skolos

What is benefit of GPU-rendered UI? In regular 2d apps where I can select enable/disable GPU rendering, disabling doesn't make app feel slower, but it drastically reduces RAM and VRAM usage (VRAM is the one I care about, as I run local models). Why so many UI frameworks brag that they are GPU-rendered?

cute_boi

Another Vibe coded slop which will probably be not maintained after 3-4 weeks.

sarabarasa100

why are we giving more accessibility to agents than to like disabled human users?

the__alchemist

Broadly: In what circumstances, use cases, preferences etc would I use this instead of EGUI or GPUI? The double-edged sword of choice!

nicoburns

If you're interested in a GPU-rendered Rust UI framework, then maybe skip this vibe coded project, and check out some of following established projects: Rust-native GUI frameworks (by crates.io downloads): 1. egui (30.3M total / 9.2M last 90 days) https://crates.io/crates/egui 2. Iced (3.2M / 770k) https://crates.io/crates/iced 3. Slint (2.4M / 955k) https://crates.io/crates/slint 4. GPUI (447k / 255k) https://crates.io/crates/gpui 5. Dioxus Native (181k / 26k) https://crates.io/crates/dioxus-native 6. Freya (49k / 12k) https://crates.io/crates/freya 7. Floem (45k / 15k) https://crates.io/crates/floem 8. Vizia (7k / 700) https://crates.io/crates/vizia List is hand-picked list, ordered by crates.io downloads. I had an LLM fetch the download counts and links. Webview based UI like Tauri and Dioxus Desktop are excluded. As are bindings to native toolkits and GTK.

cpursley

Another option is Crux, which lets use actual native UI: https://redbadger.github.io/crux

nbevans

This is from the same guys that thought building a coding agent harness with "Bun" was a good idea