There are many GUI libraries out there that make use of existing toolkits written in other languages. Honestly, I think that may just be the correct way to go.

Not only does this allow to use "normal" trees for setting up components, it also reuses most of the usability features.

Drawing a box and some text has been solved now. Several Rust libraries can render entire UIs with all the common controls you can think of. The downside of using these pure Rust libraries is that they seem focused more on features than usability. The created UI looks like it belongs inside a video game engine. It doesn't match any of the controls you'd expect to see, it doesn't even try to use your system's theme settings, or even the common OS conventions in some case, especially if you're trying to go cross platform.

One of the best ways to develop snappy GUIs that stick to your system's settings and themes is to use the windows crate and package Wine with your executable. Wine can emulate your system's theme quite convincingly and the Windows API solves most of the accessibility problems. It's a massive pain to develop against, but in my opinion the end result is much more convincing as a "real" UI than many of the native libraries.

After that, Qt provides some pretty good control libraries but interacting with it from Rust is a little painful as you need to choose between tons of wrappers or dropping Rust's safety mechanisms with unsafe{}.

Personally, I'm hoping wxRust gets worked out more, as its still in its early stages by its own admission m. WxWidgets solves my usability problem well enough and is lightweight enough that I think it could finally solve my UI usability quirks. Sure, you'll have the lack of safety guarantees and rely on the C renderer, but WxWidgets has been out for so long that I'm confident the types of bugs switching Rust would solve have mostly been found by now.