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Building the MagicMirror in Rust with iced GUI Library 🦀

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Hello fellow Rustaceans!

I recently embarked on a journey to build a custom MagicMirror using the Rust programming language, and I’d like to share my experiences. I wrost a blog post titled "software you can love: miroir Ô mon beau miroir" this project was my attempt to create a stable, resource-efficient application for the Raspberry Pi 3A.

Here's what I loved about using Rust and the iced GUI library:

  • Elm Architecture + Rust is a match made in heaven: iced was perfect for my needs with its Model, View, and Update paradigms. It helped keep my state management concise and leverage Rust type system

  • Tiny-skia Backend: Opting for this lightweight rendering library reduced the size of the binary significantly, ending with a 9MB binary.

  • Cross-Compilation: Although troublesome at first, I used ‘cross’ to cross compile Rust for armv7.

If anyone is keen, I’m thinking of open-sourcing this project and sharing it with the community. Insights on enhancing the project's functionality or any feedback would be much appreciated!

Feel free to reach out if you're interested in the technical nitty-gritty or my experience with Rust GUI libraries in general.

Thanks for reading!