Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers SE Radio 713: Héctor Ramón Jiménez on Building a GUI library in Rust
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Mar 25, 2026 Héctor Ramón Jiménez, creator of the iced GUI toolkit for Rust, built an Elm-inspired, cross-platform UI library. He talks about why iced exists, the rendering pipeline from elements to pixels, core pieces like winit, wgpu and TinySkia, async tasks for non-blocking UI, headless mode for testing, the test recorder and runtime emulator, and the challenges of mobile support and accessibility.
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Offload Downloads From The Main Update Loop
- Never perform long-running tasks inside the update method; return an asynchronous task (future) instead so the runtime executes it on another thread and sends a completion message back.
- This avoids freezing the UI and allows progress reporting via messages.
Compose UI With Nested Elm Components
- Component-style composition is natural: nest Elm-style subcomponents each with their own message/update/view, but encapsulation reduces direct access to parent state so design boundaries matter.
- Use nested messages when encapsulating reusable UI parts.
Underused 3D Shader Widget And Focus On Docs
- The shader widget supports 3D content and has been used for charting, but remains underused; documentation has seen heavy investment though still needs more community contributions.
- Good docs require a library that's already shaped for clear explanation.