The Rust programming language is everywhere and in every device these days. I see its appeal, especially now that so much implementation is agent generated. Not only do you have great type checking and memory ownership management, the agent does not have decades of poor and outdated programming practices to ignore in their training set.
Several of my colleagues have used Rust to build TUI applications, but I had not heard of anyone using it for GUI applications. That has recently changed with Brandon Thomas's explosive announcements of his Adobe application work-a-likes. These are written in Rust and utilize Emil Ernerfeldt's immediate-mode GUI egui. An immediate-mode GUI differs from a retained-mode GUI in that each update redraws the entire UI. The actual amount of UI redrawn generally only concerns those parts that have changed. This is accomplished by determining the differences between the previous state and the new state. I think everyone having worked on web frontends will be reminded of React, but React's management of the DOM and egui's management of the UI are quite different (as I understand it).
I found Ian Purton's explanation of how egui is used in PhotoCraft very helpful -- Photoshop, Rebuilt in Rust: The Architecture Behind PhotoCraft. Much of the architecture is very similar to what is used with Smalltalk and later exploited in the Eclipse and Netbeans platforms. What is novel, however, is that PhotoCraft exposes its operations via an MCP server, much as earlier applications used COM and CORBA, for example. Everything old is new again.
