It's not nearly as complex as that, but I can comment on a GUI program I've been developing for the last few months using the GTK bindings for rust [1]. I'm comparing rust today with C++/Qt as it was about 8 years ago, so bear that in mind in what follows. Before this project, the last big GUI I worked on was about 100k lines of C++, with a very intricate GUI involving both standard 2d components and quite a bit of animated OpenGL stuff. The program I'm working on now in rust is much smaller (about 20 different windows and dialogs, with various normal features along the lines of entry completion and search, and is about 5000 lines of code), but I think it's big enough that I have a feel for what it would be like to develop a big app in this environment.

After the initial bumps and scratches getting used to rust, I've found the experience to be better overall than I remember it being back in the day with C++ and Qt. I actually ended up implementing my own tiny version of signals and slots as I remembered them from Qt to handle interactions between the user and the stuff on the back end (mostly sqlite at this point). That in combination with a certain relaxed attitude about using Rc<RefCell<_>> for GUI stuff has put me in a place where I'm pretty confident that any normal GUI operation is pretty straightforward with rust.

The amount of boilerplate code seems pretty similar between the two. I think that a GUI framework specifically designed for rust might actually be a big win over other options here, but so far there isn't one that I know of that meets my needs. As it is, using the GTK components from rust is easier than using them from C (in my opinion), and comparable with my memory of using Qt in C++.

I've also found that the type system and the error handling are great compared to what I used before. They help not only in catching problems, but also in ensuring that the design is complete before I get too far into it. The code I'm writing now is much more reliable in terms of handling errors and covering corner cases than what I did back then in c++/qt. There is a price for this upfront in terms of aligning your mental model with what rust wants, especially if you're coming from the same background I was. Once that is done I don't think it's any more difficult to get stuff done here than it was there, and the results seem to be quite a bit more robust.

It wasn't all good times though - the initial unlearning/relearning curve was pretty rough for me. I've been programming professionally in various languages for about 15 years, and rust has taken longer for me to get comfortable with than any other language. That's including a wide variety of languages from various paradigms including constraint/logic programming (prolog and ciao), functional (lisp, ocaml, haskell, etc.), imperative (python,ruby,c/c++,javascript) and other more obscure ones. Something about the familiar features of algebraic data types, pattern matching, and type inference combined with the strict memory model caused a lot of mental interference that took me a long time to sort out.

The build system is actually one of the biggest reasons I stuck with rust through the pain of getting started. I really love cargo, to the point now that I can't stand the thought of going back to makefiles, cmake, or any other C++ build system I've tried. Cargo seems to just work, which means I spend less time fighting with obscure linker and compiler flags and more time getting things done. I'd put up with a lot from the language just to keep the build system, to be honest.

Overall developing a GUI app in rust has been a decent experience. If you're already comfortable with the language, I'd recommend spending the time to learn the GTK bindings. Once you internalize their basic operating scheme, the time required to get GUI stuff done with rust is comparable to other languages and toolkits, but you get the peculiar combination of benefits that come from using rust itself.

1. http://gtk-rs.org