Rune: A native GPU-rendered Rust UI framework for macOS, Windows, Linux and web(github.com)
138 pointsby mik3y7 hours ago25 comments
  • nicoburns4 hours ago
    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.
    • bryanlarsen4 hours ago
      IMO, the top GUI framework crates for Rust are windows or native-windows-gui, objc2 or icrate for MacOS and gtk4-rs for Linux only. Actually for MacOS / iOS I'd use uniffi to embed the rust core in a SwiftUI app.

      In 2026 IMO it's much better to use an LLM to keep 3 separate native front ends in sync than it is to try and use any sort of cross platform UI.

      • tadfisher4 hours ago
        An advantage of this approach is that everyone's screen readers and other accessibility tools actually work with your app.
      • kleeklee3 hours ago
        Keeping 3 separate native front ends in sync with custom visual components means you end up building a cross-platform UI. The only apps you can build without custom components are trivial ones.
        • bryanlarsen3 hours ago
          All 3 have a way of embedding webviews. In my perhaps limited experience, all desire for custom visual components are either specious or for read-only presentation views. In my opinion all controls should be native, but if you ask for a fancy data presentation I have no qualms reaching for a webview.
          • jasomillan hour ago
            So long as the web views provide for accessibility (and thus UI automation), this sounds perfectly reasonable for the majority of applications.

            Speaking of which, my dream is an "HTML light" standard with a subset of functionality specifically designed for local UI use, ideally with lightweight non-browser engines supporting this standard shipping with all major OS platforms as shared system components.

            We had browsers that ran on systems with 8 MB RAM, after all, and while it's not a fair comparison, there's no technical reason why a system with three orders of magnitude more RAM should struggle to run more than a handful of applications merely because they use HTML and JavaScript for rendering.

            • nicoburnsan hour ago
              I am building such a lightweight browser engine: https://github.com/dioxuslabs/blitz. It targets most of HTML/CSS, but leaves out (or makes optinal) a lot of the extra stuff that browsers pull in). It also has the option to use Rust instead of JavaScript for the scripting layer.

              Though 8 MB RAM is a non-starter when a single RGBA texture @4k is ~30Mb and modern system often require 2 or 3 for buffering. Somewhere around the 60MB to 100MB mark seems to be the base for modern setups, at least on macOS.

          • simonask2 hours ago
            > perhaps limited experience

            New rule: Programmers with limited UI experience (that includes myself) should abstain from weighing in on what UI designers and programmers need.

      • treyd4 hours ago
        There's also relm4 which builds a Elm-like paradigm on top of gtk4-rs.
    • auraham2 hours ago
      https://crates.io/crates/dioxus-native was released 3 months ago and does not have a link to GitHub, I do not think it can be considered as established project yet.
      • nicoburns2 hours ago
        (I am the maintainer of dioxus native, and also posted the comment above)

        So:

        - The initial version was released over a year ago (3 month is the most recent patch release of the stable version).

        - It is part of the Dioxus project (https://github.com/dioxuslabs/dioxus) which has been going since 2021 (but the other renderers are web/webview based).

        - The native renderer (https://github.com/dioxuslabs/blitz) has been under development since December 2024 (building a whole new web engine is just a big project).

        You're ultimately kind of right that it's not as established as 1-4 in the list. But I think it justifies it's place with the other frameworks lower down the list as one of the lesser-known frameworks that compete technically with those further up the list.

    • HackerThemAll3 hours ago
      Yeah, have you tried to do anything in egui? I tried today a ComboBox, but I wanted one with filter input box, "X" icon to clear it, and automatic focus.

      I've given up when the code reached 300 lines and was still buggy/not working.

      egui is not mature. I'd prefer declarative approach, data binding, and styling. Therefore will skip egui.

      • slopinthebag2 hours ago
        i've built pretty complex stuff in egui. any modern agent will one-shot that component, so i'd say it's more just a lack of familiarity with the library.
    • drnick1an hour ago
      Stick to Qt, none of those solutions are mature enough for actual production use.
    • ameliusan hour ago
      Slint is proprietary. Given that AI makes it so easy to spec out and build even entire GUI frameworks, why would you even go with proprietary anymore? And why doesn't the article showcase a full-fledged set of UI components?
    • jbirnick2 hours ago
      Luckily GPUI isn't vibe coded at all but a mature and well thought-out project.. /s
      • hmry28 minutes ago
        I tried using it and yeah, GPUI felt very sloppy. Something about that lack of documentation + having to install it from some subdirectory in a giant monorepo + Tailwind-based API...

        And the recommended component library for it (GPUI Kit) seems to have been 100% Clauded, down to the website and README.

    • Varelion3 hours ago
      Brutal and based
  • mik3y6 hours ago
    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"?)
    • atrokhymchuk4 hours ago
      I find this line pretty sad actually, what if someone wants to contribute code, written by hand? What if some beginner finds this project interesting and wants to invest own time into it?

      Or human is completely removed from the development whatsoever..

      • JoshTriplett4 hours ago
        > I find this line pretty sad actually, what if someone wants to contribute code, written by hand? What if some beginner finds this project interesting and wants to invest own time into it?

        Then they would be better off contributing to a project that welcomes them.

      • dsagent4 hours ago
        While I sympathize I think we all know a majority of contributions would not be hand written. This is optimizing for the reality we're in.

        You could fork and reference it in the issue if you still wanted to contribute.

      • viraptor3 hours ago
        > what if someone wants to contribute code, written by hand?

        It's up to the maintainer. Sometimes it's just easier to listen to what's needed and do it the way you know and are efficient with than to review someone else's code.

        > What if some beginner finds this project interesting and wants to invest own time into it?

        There's nothing stopping them. They can even publish it in a fork.

      • IOT_Apprentice2 hours ago
        Just take your hand written code and have it send it as the request to the AI.
      • hmry4 hours ago
        Yep. There's other projects that have a "we want your ideas, but not your code" policy (like SQLite and Lua), but the "just tell your agent to tell our agent what to do" framing makes me depressed.
      • varispeed9 minutes ago
        Why would you contribute code written by hand in 2026?
      • DoesntMatter224 hours ago
        Those days are over
      • devmor3 hours ago
        Why would you want to contribute thoughtfully written code to a slop project?
    • kodablah3 hours ago
      I did the same for a vibecoded project [0] but I would never do this for a human-written project. Simply put, if most contributions are similarly vibecoded and/or they will be reviewed/treated as such, then how is a PR/review from an unaffiliated agent any better than one managed by the project curator. Of course that human curation still needs to occur.

      This is a natural progression (only on these types of projects). We accepted contributions because it actually helped and they were difficult and time consuming. When that is no longer the case, contributions are a burden, the actual problem/idea is the real value, hence the request to open the issue.

      0 - https://github.com/cretz/vitaslop

    • teekert2 hours ago
      I had a Nix issue. Agents fixed it in 5 min.

      Of course, one could conclude that another agents screwed up before, still was a good experience.

    • rbehrends3 hours ago
      My main concern with this would be that for a library in particular I need a stable API and behavior (Hyrum's law). I do not know to what extent a fully autonomous agentic approach can ensure that. Note: I don't see a problem with preferring issues over pull requests (many of which would be poorly coded slop), just fully automating the handling.

      Also a bit wild to assume that no person will just create an issue manually. This is not something I'd normally use an agent for.

    • CSSer5 hours ago
      It sounds like a black hat penetration tester's nirvana. All you have to do is open the right issue to trick the model into installing the right security vulnerability or backdoor, or better yet, a series of small security vulnerabilities that can be chained to create a tailor-made exploit. It's practically a hacker's choose-your-own adventure.
      • bhouston5 hours ago
        I am not sure about that.

        Which gate is easier to maintain?

        1. Check issues for malicious intent

        2. Check PR for malicious intent.

        I think in PR requests it is easier to introduce purposeful bugs or obfuscated code than it is to hide them in issues.

        So I think gating on issues is easier and more secure.

      • notnullorvoid5 hours ago
        I suspect they'd be manually filtering which issues/features their agents attempt to fix/implement. Otherwise you end up with all sorts of features that simply make no sense for the project.

        The approach is at least better than accepting slop PRs that could have backdoors injected into them.

      • sebzim45005 hours ago
        That seems a lot harder than if they accepted PRs like everyone else
    • travisgriggs3 hours ago
      Makes this (not a real) job posting seem all the more funny/relevant:

      https://lovro-bikic.github.io/software-line-specialist/

  • rgbrgb6 hours ago
    > 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.

    • viraptor2 hours ago
      You can do the same thing with swiftui. The surface you render to doesn't have to be visible at all. And the tree has nice introspection available.
    • 0x4575 hours ago
      Headless part is neat, but agents can already drive apps and take screenshots. As a side note, I have agent driving android tv using wireless adb and hdmi capture card + mpv rpc, its fun to watch.
    • 5 hours ago
      undefined
  • owenbrown6 hours ago
    How should I think about this, compared to GPUI (https://gpui.rs)? What are pros and cons?
    • winstonp5 hours ago
      Dax on Twitter: "we just couldn't get gpui to look good enough"
  • bhouston5 hours ago
    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.

    • jmvoodoo5 hours ago
      The most common rust UI framework I’m aware of, iced, completely fails on these metrics afaik.
  • geoah6 hours ago
    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.
  • skolos5 hours ago
    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?
    • MayeulC4 hours ago
      Well, for one, it usually is much more energy-efficient: longer battery life, cooler computers, and more responsive under heavy (CPU) load.
    • devilsdata4 hours ago
      Other people have different hardware and different goals. A year or so ago I worked on a Linux laptop that was dog-slow. If I didn't enable GPU-rendering for the UI, it competed for the very limited CPU.
    • nicoburns4 hours ago
      Using less power is generally the main benefit. On lower end hardware you may also notice a performance difference, depending on what the UI is trying to display.
    • dahrkael4 hours ago
      composition with transparencies is the main one
  • etaioinshrdlu3 hours ago
    When I made my ow GPU-renderered framework I found that it was possible to render the entire UI in one call/shader to the UI. All primitives and styles can be passed as a updatable data blob that the single GPU shader handles in one call. Do most of the GPU-rendered frameworks do it this way?

    It has some tradeoffs to consider but seems quite good overall.

  • williamcotton3 hours ago
    Re: Use it with your agent

    An approach I've found useful, albeit for a DSL that ships a binary for execution, is to give a way for the LLM agent to get a high-level topic list so it can drill down all the way to specific language/API implementation details.

    Perhaps with this project the author could make a website that does the same?

  • the__alchemist4 hours ago
    Broadly: In what circumstances, use cases, preferences etc would I use this instead of EGUI or GPUI?

    The double-edged sword of choice!

    • DoesntMatter224 hours ago
      I'd like to know this too. I'm building a egui app and it's fantastic. I have tons of custom drawing and stuff though
  • piker5 hours ago
    > 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.

    • nicoburns4 hours ago
      It's definitely possible to do sharp fonts in the Rust GUI ecosystem (although you certainly won't get it out of the box). With the native text libraries if you want to (both Servo, Zed/GPUI, and anything using Skia do this), or emulated with Skrifa + Vello.

      But I agree with the reset

    • hmry5 hours ago
      Yeah. Presumably "native" here just means "not Electron", which is the sales pitch for most AI-generated Rust libraries these days. ("Tell your agent to rewrite your Electron app into Rust~! :rocket emoji:")
  • GaronG5 hours ago
    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.
  • mrpotato5 hours ago
    Rune, the rust ui framework, not to be confused with Rune, an embeddable dynamic programming language for Rust
  • efficax5 hours ago
    What does "native" mean to these people. Native UI means using the widgets provided by the operating system. This is not that.
    • fishgoesblub5 hours ago
      I have the same annoyance. It's continually maddening to see "native" plastered everywhere only for it to be some non-native junk. I miss when native meant something like Qt.
      • foresto3 hours ago
        Qt is an interesting case, because it doesn't use the native platform's widget code*, but does a good job of looking and behaving as though it does. That's usually close enough for me.

        Various other toolkits have tried this approach, but unfortunately, I'm not aware of any others that succeed. Common deficiencies include keyboard navigation and text rendering.

        *(Except on Qt-based desktops like KDE Plasma, of course.)

    • factotvm5 hours ago
      I've been thinking a lot about the term "native" as I come from mobile. When writing a core in Rust (which I like to do), and then layering on the operating system's UI SDK components per platform (which I also like to do), what is native and what isn't, especially when you throw in React Native to the discussion?

      I like your definition quite a bit, but I need another word for, "code that doesn't need a runtime to execute."

      I ended up using "experience layer" to describe the SDK components.

    • eska4 hours ago
      Changing times. Nowadays a lot of software UIs are developed by people with a web UI background. Those people won’t learn the OS-native UIs because that would mean they’d give up on their existing knowledge. Because of that native means “not running in an embedded web browser” to many nowadays.
    • thayne4 hours ago
      Native often means "not a wrapper around a webview".

      If you define it as "using the widgets provided by the operating system", then "native" is by definition incompatible with "cross-platform." And what does that mean on Linux, where the operating system doesn't provide widgets? Are gtk and Qt not native?

      • foresto3 hours ago
        Adding to this...

        When discussing GUI toolkits, "native" should be understood to mean "native to the host's graphical environment".

        "Native to the OS" might or might not be equivalent, depending on the OS and what one considers "OS" to mean. (Does it mean a kernel? A desktop distro? Something else?) Because of this ambiguity, it's not a very practical way to approach the discussion. Different people attach different meanings to that phrase.

        Some frameworks are native to Qt. Others are native to Gtk. Practically none are native to Linux. ;)

        I don't think "cross-platform" is incompatible with "native". It has been achieved more than once using toolkit wrappers, usually selected at build time.

  • bovermyer6 hours ago
    So it's a UI framework by agents, for agents?
  • varispeed10 minutes ago
    > and the web,

    And no live examples...

  • sarabarasa1004 hours ago
    why are we giving more accessibility to agents than to like disabled human users?
    • eska4 hours ago
      I wonder whether that results in better accessibility for disabled people in the end because agents can control UIs for them.
  • esafak5 hours ago
    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/
    • anentropic5 hours ago
      there are tests, no?

      e.g. https://github.com/anomalyco/rune/tree/dev/crates/rune-kit/t...

      • QuantumNomad_5 hours ago
        Indeed. But why not run the tests in CI when merging to master?
        • efficax5 hours ago
          Where I work, we've moved CI "left", all tests are run on the developers machine before merging
          • esafak4 hours ago
            You're not shifting left unless you guarantee local tests always run, faithfully to production. That rarely happens. Local testing should be supplementary. We use https://hk.jdx.dev/
            • efficax4 hours ago
              We do ensure this, requiring signed proof, running in containers that would be identical to github runners (more or less). Now, this could be spoofed by an engineer, but we operate in a high trust environment
              • esafak4 hours ago
                This is interesting. Are you using an available product for managing these signatures, or did you write your own?
      • esafak5 hours ago
        They ain't running in CI.
  • nbevans4 hours ago
    This is from the same guys that thought building a coding agent harness with "Bun" was a good idea
  • cpursley4 hours ago
    Another option is Crux, which lets use actual native UI:

    https://redbadger.github.io/crux

  • cute_boi4 hours ago
    Another Vibe coded slop which will probably be not maintained after 3-4 weeks.
  • rvz6 hours ago
    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...

    • bhouston5 hours ago
      Wait, zero tests? It is super cheap to write tests these days. It is how you gate agent generated code from destroying production.
      • wuliwong4 hours ago
        They have tests, this person is just wrong.
    • wuliwong4 hours ago
      What are you talking about? They definitely have tests.
    • auscvlt4 hours ago
      Damn, this README is more of a DONTREADME. Even the root README is for agents, not people. The more I see stuff like this, the more I think about becoming a welder or a carpenter...
    • eviks5 hours ago
      Why do you say 0 tests? Are the other statements similarly precise?
    • the__alchemist4 hours ago
      You're not kidding - that README is not readable.
      • Phelinofist4 hours ago
        I don't thinks its intended to be read by humans
    • sick_of_slop5 hours ago
      [dead]
  • ForHackernews6 hours ago
    ...what does this do? Is it just a vibecoded version of https://www.egui.rs/
    • roblh5 hours ago
      The site is wild, but the little triangles in the bottom right corners of each window don't work properly on chrome desktop in windows 11. They aren't clickable, you can only resize the windows horizontally. Which seems weird considering how polished the rest of it looks.
    • skavi5 hours ago
      it doesn’t look immediate mode to me?
    • esafak5 hours ago
      It presumably powers OpenCode, the agent harness.
    • bhouston5 hours ago
      The website for https://www.egui.rs sort of sucks, it took around 10 seconds to load and initialize for some reason.
      • hmry5 hours ago
        It's a fun tech demo, egui isn't meant to make websites. It's primarily for integration into games/other real-time-3D-rendered applications, and secondarily for GUI applications via eframe.

        But I agree, I think they would be better served by making a normal website and linking to the demo prominently (For comparison, see iced's website https://iced.rs, which is great IMO)

        • Narishma5 hours ago
          > For comparison, see iced's website https://iced.rs, which is great IMO

          This isn't much better. It's super laggy with high CPU usage.

      • Narishma5 hours ago
        It doesn't even load if you don't have WebGL2.
  • aniq_ui2 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • chiengineer34 hours ago
    [dead]