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Melody Horn
Personal blog · boringcactus.comprogramminggames
Melody Horn writes boringcactus, a personal blog at boringcactus.com about programming and games. Since 2020, 35 different Hacker News readers have linked it 40 times, most often “A 2025 Survey of Rust GUI Libraries”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-10-04, and you can follow it by feed.
immortal programming goddess
Most-linked posts?
- A 2025 Survey of Rust GUI Libraries12 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2025-04-14
- Post-Open Source8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-08-13
- /assets/site.js3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-04-15
- A Survey of Rust Embeddable Scripting Languages3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-04-22
- A survey of rust GUI libraries2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-11-20
- An Anti-License Manifesto (2021)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-08-22
- Not “Any Purpose”2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-02-11
What Hacker News says?
I'm going to replicate one of my recent replies ([4] which unsurprisingly got me downvoted, but I regret nothing) here because it seems relevant. Specifically, Marak seems to grok the exploitatitive nature of the current setup (chosen in part by themselves) but lacks real negotiation leverage because they have no organization behind them (besides people cheering them on in the comments). With this in mind, I think i…
Comment linking /2020/08/13/post-open-source.htm
on “No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This”Submitted Post-Open Source as a story · 88 points
HN discussion// Vidrun, born of the sea-wind through the spruce // Vidrun, green-tinged offshoot of my bough, joy and burden of my life // Vidrun, fierce and clever, may our clan’s wisdom be yours: // // Never read Hacker News // - Aphyr, "Hexing the technical interview" if (document.referrer.startsWith("https://news.ycombinator.com")) { document.location = "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Human_fart.wav" }…
Comment linking /assets/site.js
on “Ratatui – App Showcase”Submitted A 2025 Survey of Rust GUI Libraries as a story · 18 points
HN discussionPeople keep asking why TUIs in Rust and the answer is because the GUI situation in Rust is dreadful: https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-... Rust is simply not meant for GUI-based data design but I still want Qt in Rust. That's it. Not QML or Slint. No markup at all. None of the immediate mode things. No other languages. Definitely not GTK. I'm worried it will never happen for Rust and it wil…
Comment linking /2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-gui-libraries.html
on “Ratatui – App Showcase”Submitted A 2025 Survey of Rust GUI Libraries as a story · 10 points
HN discussionyeah slint, which is most similar to Qt see https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-...
Comment linking /2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-gui-libraries.html
on “Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust”Submitted A 2025 Survey of Rust GUI Libraries as a story · 7 points
HN discussion> Like, everyone does realize that the tech giants just found a way to make the community work for them and to make money off the backs of it right? People are starting to realize this, but to understand it it's important to disambiguate "free" and "open source" software. See https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.htm... for one perspective.
Comment linking /2020/08/13/post-open-source.html
on “The dispassionate developer”Submitted Can We Please Move Past Git? as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThe problem (okay, "a" problem) here is that it is indeed OSS, and not FOSS, that is being used. It might be worth re-visiting "Post-Open Source" by Melody Horn (boringcactus) [1] on this. You might want to copy/paste that link instead of clicking. :) It has been discussed here before [2] and (unsurprisingly, IMHO) gotten quite a bit of blow-back from the HN crowd. The General Intellect Unit podcast recently had an…
Comment linking /2020/08/13/post-open-source.html
on “AWS pre-announces public container image registry”Submitted A 2025 Survey of Rust GUI Libraries as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSee https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/21/survey-of-rust-gui-l ... (2020) and https://www.boringcactus.com/2021/10/24/2021-survey-of-rust- ... (2021). These write-ups don’t evaluate performance, but i assume any of these libraries which use Qt/GTK/Electron are as performant as Qt/GTK/Electron, and the libraries which draw using Skia or OpenGL are very fast.
Comment linking /2021/10/24/2021-survey-of-rust-
on “Iced – A cross-platform GUI library for Rust, inspired by Elm”Submitted A 2025 Survey of Rust GUI Libraries as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/09/16/survey-of-rust-embed... For some reason, clicking on that link automatically downloads a file named "Human Fart.wav"...
Comment linking /2020/09/16/survey-of-rust-embeddable-scripting-languages.html
on “Rhai: An embedded scripting language for Rust”Submitted A 2025 Survey of Rust GUI Libraries as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHere are two real-world examples of using Rhai: https://glicol.org/tour#meta1 https://glicol.org/tour#meta2 I've embedded Rhai in Glicol to support sample-level audio synthesis, and the performance is [acceptable]. Real-time audio is very computationally intensive, after all. I've tried various embedded scripting languages in Rust, but Rhai probably has the best documentation and playground. For reference, see this…
Comment linking /2020/09/16/survey-of-rust-embeddable-scripting-languages.html
on “Rhai: An embedded scripting language for Rust”Submitted Not “Any Purpose” as a story · 3 points
HN discussionView source: https://www.boringcactus.com/assets/site.js
Comment linking /assets/site.js
on “Writing a blatant Telegram clone using Qt, QML and Rust. And C++”Submitted A survey of rust GUI libraries as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe GUI situation in Rust is dreadful: https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-... Rust is simply not meant for GUI-based data design but I still want Qt in Rust. That's it. Not QML or Slint or egui or Tauri or gpui or Iced. No markup at all. None of the immediate mode things. No double and triple languages like this C++ mess. Definitely not GTK or the other non-imperative subpar things. There is…
Comment linking /2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-gui-libraries.html
on “Writing a blatant Telegram clone using Qt, QML and Rust. And C++”Submitted An Anti-License Manifesto (2021) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis from Melody Horn back in 2020 is a great companion piece to this. https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.htm... https://web.archive.org/web/20231215222059/https://www.borin... They both echoed that we need to be prepared for such environment and they have some good points.
Comment linking /2020/08/13/post-open-source.html
on “What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it”Submitted A 2021 Survey of Rust GUI Libraries as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> It refutes the idea that the "developer joy is pretty low" either way. https://deadmoney.gg/news/articles/migrating-away-from-rust https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-... https://gist.github.com/rtfeldman/77fb430ee57b42f5f2ca973a39... https://medium.com/@rusty-vibes/part-4-abandoning-rust-for-c... A pile of evidence refutes your statement. Ther…
Comment linking /2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-gui-libraries.html
on “Reflecting on a Year of Gamedev in Zig”Submitted A Survey of Rust GUI Libraries as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-... I started writing a program that needed to have a table with 1 million rows. This means it needs to be virtualised. Pretty common in GUI libraries. The only Rust GUI library I found that could do this easily was gpui-component ( https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component ). It also renders text crisply (rules out egui), looks nice with the default sty…
Comment linking /2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-gui-libraries.html
on “Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu”Submitted A Survey of Rust GUI Libraries as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI disagree somewhat with the anti-license manifesto mentioned in the tangents. The one here: https://www.boringcactus.com/2021/09/29/anti-license-manifes... Problem is, if you do not license your software, then under existing 9th Circuit precedent it is illegal to use your software - for any purpose. You are creating a trap to be sprung on people who don't understand the law. Is the US legal system anti-justice, at…
Comment linking /2021/09/29/anti-license-manifesto.html
on “An archeaological dive through a software copyright concern”Submitted Post-Open Source as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
