Overview

AI, Data Science & Cloud Certificates from Google, IBM & Meta — 40% Off

One plan covers every Professional Certificate on Coursera. 40% off Coursera Plus Annual.

Build native desktop applications in Rust on Linux. This hands-on course walks you through five GUI frameworks — iced, FLTK, GTK4, relm4, and egui — on Kubuntu, building a portfolio of working applications: a counter, a calculator with unit tests, a to-do list, a Pong game, a password generator, Simon Says, and a quiz app. You will install Rust with rustup, configure Kate as a Rust editor with embedded terminal, and use cargo and clippy to build and lint each project. The course closes with patterns for production: choosing the right framework, persisting state to disk, keeping the UI responsive while data loads, and shipping a binary that runs on every Linux desktop. Every demo is recorded in real time on a Kubuntu 24.04 workstation, so you see the full edit-compile-run loop, including dependency wiring and clippy warnings. By the end, you will have built eight working GUIs in Rust and know which framework to reach for when the browser is the wrong surface.

Syllabus

GUIs for Data Engineering — Why and How

Frame why a native Rust GUI is the right surface when the browser is the wrong one — offline-first ingestion, microsecond latency, and data that must never leave the machine. Read CSV and query SQLite from a desktop app, plot with egui_plot and plotters, and trace the state-message-update-view loop common to retained-mode frameworks.

Environment Setup and Iced Hello World

Stand up a Kubuntu Rust development environment from scratch — install rustup and the toolchain, switch from Bash to Zsh, and configure Kate with an embedded terminal for tight edit/build cycles. Then implement the iced Sandbox trait to write a Hello World and a counter button that updates state in response to messages.

Building an iced Calculator

Build a 150-line iced calculator with a state struct, a message enum, and a view function — then add unit tests that exercise the calculator's update logic without launching a window. Walk through the core iced widgets (button, text, column, row, container) and modify each to extend the calculator's behavior.

An iced To-Do List

Extend the iced patterns from Week 3 into a list-driven application. Back the to-do list with a Vec of TodoItem values in state, wire up the iced text_input widget for new-item entry, and route per-row toggle and delete actions through the message enum so each item mutates independently.

A Pong Game with FLTK

Walk through the official FLTK Pong example, then extend it across four iterations: add a pause button that halts the game loop, a slider that varies paddle speed at runtime, and a high-score file written to disk between sessions. Each step is a concrete state-and-message extension to a working game.

A Password Generator with GTK4

Build a GTK4 password generator using the gtk4 crate's ApplicationWindow, Entry, and Button widgets, with the rand crate generating random ASCII characters. Add a ToggleButton that flips the Entry's visibility property to mask or reveal the generated password.

Simon Says with relm4

Build a Simon Says game with relm4 — a Rust GUI framework that layers an ELM-style Component trait on top of GTK4. Lay out four colored buttons in a 2 by 2 grid, then add a Vec of Color values as the sequence and a playback timer that lights each button in turn before the player has to repeat the pattern.

A Quiz Application with egui

Build a quiz application in egui — an immediate-mode framework where the entire UI is redrawn every frame from current state. Define a Question struct, run a frame-counted timer that ticks down each draw, and accumulate a score across a multi-question quiz with a restart flow at the end.

Patterns and Production

Compare iced, egui, GTK4, FLTK, and relm4 head-to-head — ergonomics, platform reach, async story, theming. Add provable contracts to GUI state with the assert_invariant macro so impossible UI states fail loudly at runtime, then ship a release with cargo-dist for cross-platform binaries, Flatpak for sandboxed Linux, and AppImage for portable distribution.