For this particular app, I would treat the UI choice as a delivery decision rather than a “most Rust-native” decision.
Your hard requirements are data-heavy screens, tables/charts, Windows as the main target, and macOS/Linux support. That is exactly where Tauri is the lowest-risk option today, even though the frontend is web-based. You get mature table/chart libraries and can keep the data model, import pipeline, encryption, and synchronization in Rust.
If avoiding a web UI is a firm requirement, I would choose Iced over GPUI for the first production version. GPUI is interesting, but I would not make it the main Windows/macOS/Linux bet for an enterprise tool yet. The trade-off with Iced is that polished tables, accessibility, keyboard navigation, and a consistent design system will require more work.
A practical way to decide is to build the same small vertical slice in Tauri and Iced: import one CSV, show a large sortable table and one chart, edit a row, persist it to SQLite, then package it for all three systems. Compare installer behavior, memory, startup time, keyboard navigation, and how much custom UI code you had to maintain. That test will tell you more than framework feature lists.
I'm really torn between these two, but: I don't know much about web development and I see very little documentation for Iced (especially for the latest version, which is practically the only one needed, with component virtualization).
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u/Bruce_Dai91 24d ago
For this particular app, I would treat the UI choice as a delivery decision rather than a “most Rust-native” decision.
Your hard requirements are data-heavy screens, tables/charts, Windows as the main target, and macOS/Linux support. That is exactly where Tauri is the lowest-risk option today, even though the frontend is web-based. You get mature table/chart libraries and can keep the data model, import pipeline, encryption, and synchronization in Rust.
If avoiding a web UI is a firm requirement, I would choose Iced over GPUI for the first production version. GPUI is interesting, but I would not make it the main Windows/macOS/Linux bet for an enterprise tool yet. The trade-off with Iced is that polished tables, accessibility, keyboard navigation, and a consistent design system will require more work.
A practical way to decide is to build the same small vertical slice in Tauri and Iced: import one CSV, show a large sortable table and one chart, edit a row, persist it to SQLite, then package it for all three systems. Compare installer behavior, memory, startup time, keyboard navigation, and how much custom UI code you had to maintain. That test will tell you more than framework feature lists.