Building Embedded GUIs Just Got Easier with Slint

The pain of embedded UI development

Creating user interfaces for embedded systems is notoriously tedious. Long compile times, fragmented toolchains, and cryptic markup languages have made GUI development a hurdle—even for seasoned engineers.

But at Embedded World 2025, we caught up with Slint, an open-source team on a mission to simplify GUI development across desktop, mobile, and embedded systems. Their solution? A lightweight, declarative UI framework that runs efficiently everywhere.

What is Slint?

Slint is a cross-platform GUI framework optimised for embedded use. It runs on everything from Linux desktops to bare-metal MCUs like the Raspberry Pi Pico, requiring as little as 250 KB of RAM.

More importantly, it makes the GUI development process fast and visual. With live preview support in Visual Studio Code and a dedicated UI language, engineers can create and test components in real time—no waiting for slow compile cycles.

From “Hello World” to full dashboards

In our demo, Slint developer Nigel walked us through how a simple “Hello World” GUI can be scaled up into a full home automation dashboard—all using the same intuitive design language.

Text, buttons, images, and views are all described as simple primitives. These are then composed into larger components with clearly defined properties. Even non-developers can pick it up, thanks to the visual, readable syntax.

Designed for embedded

Unlike bloated desktop-first frameworks, Slint was built with embedded use cases in mind. It compiles your UI code into small, efficient binaries that can run without an OS. That makes it ideal for consumer devices, smart home interfaces, or any constrained MCU application.

There’s no need to worry about memory limits—unless you’re stuffing in video files, the framework does the optimisation for you.

Why choose Slint?

Slint is fully open source, easy to get started with, and focused solely on solving GUI challenges. It doesn’t try to replace your app logic—it integrates with whatever backend you’re already using.

It’s a focused tool, and that’s what makes it powerful. You get modern UI performance, flexibility, and a language that’s actually enjoyable to use.