One of those efforts is druid. I'm deliberately choosing not to make a lot of noise on social media yet, but I suggest people actively looking for native GUI in Rust take a closer look. Our team (currently two people funded full time, a GSoC student, plus a growing, dedicated community) is solving the hard problems, and we're on the hook for delivering a basic font editor by the end of the year. The webpage and demos don't look impressive yet, but this is because we're currently focusing on building out the core.
Druid and OrbTk have definitely caught my attention. The challenge for me is that while I have relatively simple needs for now (buttons, text, table widgets), I would like to do things not represented by the examples. With the (understandable) paucity of documentation it's difficult to be productive.
My current challenge is to swap out different top-level views as I navigate to different parts of the app. This may may be something best suited to something like Cursive.rs, but I'm still holding out hope that the GUI toolkits will mature at a reasonable clip.
It's really quite refreshing to see something more portable and lightweight than Electron gain traction. So far the only major detractor I've seen is that the project uses Zulip for chat/messaging and it's put behind a registration wall.
The two funded full-timers focused on making a font editor using druid as the GUI toolkit. I personally think this is the best way to grow an ambitious new toolkit from scratch. Also, there's overlap with the xi team, but in Silicon Valley speak you might say we've pivoted.
The GSoC student project is a GPU compute renderer for 2D graphics. Early experiments (piet-metal) show promise that this could advance the state of the art.
How coupled is druid to druid-shell? It would be great if it would easily be embeddable into projects that already have platform native windowing code.
It definitely depends on druid-shell, but we're also thinking about being a good guest (ie for VST and the like). But honestly our focus is full desktop apps right now.
