Spent the last 6 hours trying to get a hello world equivalent gui window with a button on rust under windows.
This task which one might think is simple ended up taking literal hours and still hasn't been achieved because: the tutorials for gtk on windows and rust suggest putting msys2 bin directory on the path. This causes rust to fail to build correctly because it uses the wrong gcc and linkers.
Afterwards I managed it by using the appropriate environment variables.
But then I found out the dynamically linked libarries weren't found. I tried getting a way to copy them but it turned out to be too much work so I just moved the executable to the same dir.
Only to find out that gtk4 has no accessibility on Windows. Not bad accessibility, not accessibility that needs to be turned on. No. Accessibility. At all.
So then I decided to try Qt, which wants me to create an account to get an installer. Absolute no.
Got the 1.5gb sources and trying now to get an off-line installer out of it.
To get a fucking window with a button in it.
I don't think it's unreasonable for me to say this state of affairs is complete bullshit, and that most people with a normal level of motivation would have found plenty of opportunities to have given up. I still might.
(Not using NWG because tying the data to the GUI elements is non-trivial, it seems to require copying a lot and using twice the memory.)
#a11y #rust #gui #windows
