Hacker News

points by nicoburns 1 day ago | 0 comments

For anyone looking at Rust GUI: don't expect GPUI to be the fastest. From what I've heard, Iced, Slint, Dioxus Native, Freya, etc are all faster. Despite claims of being blazingly fast, GPUI isn't that optimized. Zed gets away with it because it's UI is simple.

[–] bita_nidir 1 day ago

Really? From what I've heard, Iced, Slint, Dioxus Native, Freya, etc are all slower.

[–] hackyhacky 1 day ago

If only there were some way to determine speed based on observable data. Oh well maybe some day.

[–] nicoburns 1 day ago

Some actual numbers (vibe coded benchmark ported from the JS framework benchmark):

  Median update+build time per frame (ms), lower is better
  Machine: macOS 26 VM, Apple M4 (virtual)

  benchmark (ms)      Dioxus    Iced    egui   Slint    GPUI
  create 1k            12.91   17.57   10.66   26.99   22.32
  replace 1k           14.46   14.48    7.48   17.07   17.41
  update every 10th     2.12    1.94    4.17    5.55   10.65
  select row            1.16    0.37    3.50    6.62   10.68
  swap rows             1.45    0.42    3.53    4.10   10.26
  remove row            1.32    0.39    3.27    4.46   11.95
  create 10k          124.97  152.52   58.97  136.07  164.58
  append 1k to 10k     28.12  157.67   33.01   69.93  117.70
  clear 1k              3.00    0.86    0.07    4.60    0.04
  scroll frame          0.28    0.10    0.55    4.23    3.79

Dioxus above is Dioxus Native.

These are CPU-only times for the state management / style / layout / etc, but don't include rasterization (additional work in the benchmark harness required to measure GPU time sensibly), probably aren't fully apples-to-apples, and could probably do with testing some more complex layouts.

[–] anthony-eid 1 day ago

Do you have a repo or something i could run the benchmark locally with please?

[–] nu11ptr 1 day ago

Did you test gpui_fast? I'm curious how it compares.

[–] nicoburns 1 day ago

I did not, but judging from it's README it may well solve most of the issues.

[–] dzogchen 1 day ago

Why the snarky comment? We already have to data points: one person heard it was faster, another person heard it was slower. If more and more people tell what they've heard then we will know the truth. Please go read how science works!

[–] moi2388 1 day ago

Now if only we could peer review our peers’ reviews..

[–] Matumio 1 day ago

If only the game I am surely going to develop some day would not waste 7% of the rendering budget on drawing the menu sliders! Must research all options now before I start. Must make an objective choice, so I need number that can be compared neutrally between frameworks. So, rendering performance it is.

[–] shaky-carrousel 1 day ago

This must be the lowest effort hacker news comment ever. And I've made some really low effort myself.

[–] rat9988 1 day ago

It is enough to counter the original claims though.

[–] cropcirclbureau 1 day ago

This matches my findings. Asides from some performance footgun, it all strikes me as a single purpose, low level thing with a DX only an LLM could love. I suppose many today don't need more than that but I found the other Rust GUI solutions to be maturing rapidly with better stories across the board.

The main thing GPUI has going for it is mind share and that's a great thing to have. The mind share is unfortunately highly fragmented though as the original authors are not interested in selling a GUI library. Hopefully the community efforts will come together to produce a more polished and general library. A well used library is better than a better designed one maintained by a single person.

[–] rudedogg 1 day ago

It really annoys me the rust library is named “GPUI”. That’s the name of this method that’s been used for eternity by games.

It’d be like naming my http library HTTP.

And it’s why Dear IMGUI isn’t just named “IMGUI”.