Addressing the Iced/WGPU problem

[Rudxain]

There are multiple issues in WGPU v0.19 and Iced v0.12:

• bug(scope): EGL says it can present to the window but not natively #459
• feat: make package descriptions selectable and copyable #1010 (comment) & fix(list-description-crash): add null action on scroll #1036
• bug(crash): panic in main: "called Option::unwrap() on a None value" #432
• fix: force wgpu to use dedicated/discrete graphics-card, to avoid Vulkan issues #850
• and more...

As explained previously, (properly) fixing those issues would require upgrading to Iced v0.13 (or later), but since that version introduces many API-breaking-changes, the migration is non-trivial.

Here are some excerpts of messages I've sent in the dev-team's Discord channel:

[...] we could switch to GTK or some other UI library. Rust can use the C ABI, either directly (unsafe FFI) or via safe bindings to unsafe code

On second thought, GTK may be a bad idea. I've heard that Windows support is still experimental. And I've seen with my own eyes that GTK4 apps tend to use orders of magnitude more memory than their GTK3 equivalents:

• Eye of GNOME vs Loupe
• GNOME Terminal vs Console
• IIRC, even some calculator apps

I think we should focus on choosing one of these:

• ditch Iced for a better GUI toolkit
• migrate to the new Iced
• make a CLI edition of the app (feat: CLI #746)
• something else... ?

I'm posting this discussion because of that last paragraph. I'm asking the community for insights and opinions, so that we can decide faster about where to focus our time+energy

[Rudxain]

STATUS UPDATE: We are currently focusing on merging patches from forks that upgrade Iced. See these for more info:

• Iamanaws's PR: chore(deps): bump iced from 0.12.0 to 0.13.1  #1064
• alfonso133's fork