Underlying Toolkit [LWN.net]

Underlying Toolkit

Posted Dec 19, 2025 11:00 UTC (Fri) by vasvir (subscriber, #92389)
Parent article: Going boldly into the COSMIC desktop environment

COSMIC is built on iced a rust toolkit.

It would be interesting to know how this modern toolkit compares with Qt or GTK.

to post comments

Underlying Toolkit

Posted Dec 22, 2025 4:43 UTC (Mon) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link] (1 responses)

While COSMIC is considered production-ready at this point, Iced still describes itself as "experimental" on GitHub.

In terms of what it is capable of, I would say that COSMIC itself is a pretty good showcase of that.

Underlying Toolkit

Posted Dec 22, 2025 15:53 UTC (Mon) by Tarnyko (subscriber, #90061) [Link]

The wording of Iced documentation always made me cautious about eventually using it, by insisting on it being an "experimental, developers first" experience.
But if it's good enough for the COSMIC guys, then I suppose it is now desktop-ready!

Underlying Toolkit

Posted Dec 27, 2025 22:17 UTC (Sat) by peterhoeg (guest, #4944) [Link] (4 responses)

Comparing iced to Qt is a bit like comparing a unicycle to a space ship. Iced is really just a widget toolkit whereas the Qt platform provides a huge amount of functionality in many different areas - one of which is UI widgets.

Underlying Toolkit

Posted Dec 29, 2025 11:35 UTC (Mon) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (3 responses)

I hope no Rust library will ever feel the need to ship with 27 different kinds of reinvented wheels the way Qt does.

Underlying Toolkit

Posted Dec 29, 2025 17:04 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (guest, #5198) [Link] (2 responses)

That is very very unlikely to happen because the conditions around the creation of the Rust ecosystem and Qt are vastly different. Qt was created in the 90's when code sharing over the Internet was much more primitive and C++ was much newer so the "batteries included" approach was necessary because it was prohibitively complex to scavenge the necessary functionality piecemeal. Today with Rust you have ubiquitous git and Internet, so a tool like cargo to manage the complexity of building software using multiple reusable components, and the way Rust handles compatibility between Rust libraries, makes it easier to break down functionality into smaller reusable units.

Underlying Toolkit

Posted Dec 29, 2025 18:30 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Of particular note, Qt predates the STL, so even `std::string` was being reinvented everywhere. Once it did show up, it didn't have the same features (e.g., CoW) everywhere, so `QString` persisted.

Underlying Toolkit

Posted Dec 30, 2025 16:15 UTC (Tue) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link]

Additionally QString & all of Qt's other container classes have so many useful functions that using them over the STL equivalents is basically a no-brainer. It's sooooooo much easier, both to write and to read. There's sooooooooooooo much more functionality, too.