Was there some new developments with this project that renewed interest recently? I started learning Rust in 2018 or 2019 and I think "good Rust GUI" research is probably at least that old.

Been using it with mixed success. While I love vello, Xilem is less mature in comparison. Many standard UI components, such as selection box, are not implemented yet. On the other hand, it’s a great opportunity to become a contributor towards a genuinely useful and promising project!

I keep trying Xilem and then egui or Iced. Xilem needs more widgets out of the box to be easy to build with. Slint is another option. I wonder what cross platform GUI framework (from any language) will finally become as common as Electron based apps or the vast number of native OS apps in Windows or macOS or Linux.

I keep going back to Tauri, which is practical to build desktop apps quickly but still uses HTML, CSS, JS to build the UI. You can use Rust web UI tools but then it is still (system) browser based.

Why not just use Flutter with Rust, via the flutter_rust_bridge (https://cjycode.com/flutter_rust_bridge/quickstart)? Seems like a reasonable combo to me.

Is there a plan for this to compete the experiment any time (soon)?

Very happy with qmetaobject-rs. Qt is tried and tested, dnd multi platform. Also, UI itself is best done declaratively not imperatively. Qmetaobject-rs gives you the best of both worlds: great UI declaratively, logic in Rust.