# Iced

36 Hacker News commenters recommended Iced and 9 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Popular Rust GUI library praised for its clean architecture, simple API and quick development; people note sparse documentation, few built-in widgets and a slow startup.

## Why people recommend it

- Clean architecture and Elm-style model (4 comments): "Iced is the only Rust toolkit that I track that solves the architecture part upfront." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46185947)) "iced for a nice architecture but you have to roll all your own widgets" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47004883)) "after using Iced, IMO this is probably one of the best gui models" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46198164))
- Easy to build and prototype with (5 comments): "Definitely use Iced.rs, no one cares about it's early pre-1.0 state. It has good fundamentals and is easy to use." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47035472)) "I find the framework very performant and the resulting program easy to prototype and expand upon." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48517068)) "the iced apps have taken less time to develop more features with fewer bugs (and no segfaults)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195281))
- Fast startup and low memory use (3 comments): "I find the framework very performant and the resulting program easy to prototype and expand upon." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48517068)) "My iced apps startup much faster than the Qt(Pyside) and Electron apps they replaced" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46194567)) "If you add 10,000 counters, it won't increase the ram." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46207465))
- Simple, pure Rust via cargo (2 comments): "simplicity to Iced being pure rust managed through cargo that I enjoy" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46197088)) "I love iced for its simplicity and flexibility" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47693423))

## What people warn about

- Missing basic widgets, roll your own (4 comments): "Custom widgets aren’t particularly hard to do in iced, but I wish some of those common cases would be committed back" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47005154)) "lacking basic things from more mature libraries (unsurprisingly, since it's still early)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006023)) "iced for a nice architecture but you have to roll all your own widgets" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47004883))
- Slow startup, close to Electron (4 comments): "startup is blazingly slow (one of the big issues of all those awful electron apps which the native frameworks can supposedly avoid)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46191026)) "IMO, both suffer from having very slow release cadence" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46197487)) "iced would be a few seconds (as also noted in the issue linked), but that's still way closer to the Electron range" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46194719))
- Single maintainer, no release cadence (3 comments): "Iced seems really promising, however, it's a passion project by a single developer." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47005810)) "the developer is very open about it being a personal project" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47016139)) "Not having a set release cadence and it more or less being on the whims of the one maintainer" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46191293))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Qt](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qt.md): 191 recommend
- [GTK](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gtk.md): 85 recommend
- [Windows Forms](https://hackerapproved.com/p/winforms.md): 76 recommend
- [SwiftUI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/swiftui.md): 75 recommend
- [Tcl/Tk](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tcl-tk.md): 61 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Iced", https://hackerapproved.com/p/iced/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).