Of course linting and formatting is not part of the language. Of course you can install extensions in some IDE that will handle it. Conan looks great but I never saw a project using it and when I was asking C devs about dependency management no one mentioned it. I checked dozens of GTK projects looking for some decent template to copy and didn't find anything remotely "modern". All projects I see simply use meson/ninja, install deps on system level, don't provide any code formatting or linting guidelines. Most don't bother with any modules and just dump all source code into 100 files in src. And I'm talking about actively developed tools for Gnome, not some long forgotten ones. For me the big difference between languages like C and Rust is that every Rust project uses the same formatting, linting tools, uses modules and proper dependency management while most C projects don't. Because it's old. Because a lot of C devs learned programming when it wasn't a thing. Because a lot of C project started when those tools didn't exist. You can probably start a new C project in 'modern' way but when I was trying to do it there were no examples, no documentation and when I asked C devs I was told that "you just do it like always". In modern languages the default way is the "modern" way.

This is how you declare a new component in gtk-rs:

glib::wrapper! {
    pub struct MainMenu(ObjectSubclass<imp::MainMenu>)
        @extends gtk::PopoverMenu, gtk::Popover, gtk::Window, gtk::Widget,
        @implements gtk::Accessible, gtk::Buildable, gtk::ConstraintTarget, gtk::Native, gtk::ShortcutManager;
}

impl MainMenu {
    pub fn new() -> Self {
        Object::new(&[]).expect("Failed to create `MainMenu`.")
    }
}

#[glib::object_subclass]
impl ObjectSubclass for MainMenu {
    const NAME: &'static str = "MainMenu";
    type Type = super::MainMenu;
    type ParentType = gtk::PopoverMenu;

    fn class_init(klass: &mut Self::Class) {
        klass.bind_template();
    }

    fn instance_init(obj: &glib::subclass::InitializingObject<Self>) {
        obj.init_template();
    }
}

This is how you declare a new component in Leptos:

#[component]
fn App() -> impl IntoView {

    view! {
   <div>test</div>
    }
}

That's what I mean by "it's not ergonomic".

Interesting, I didn't realize Vala was designed specifically to help with GTK. It could be a skill issue but I found the entire ecosystem really hard to understand. It's like all documentation is written assuming you already know half of it. "Vala uses the GObject system". Yeah but I'm just deciding which language to use to learn GTK, I don't know what GObject is... Now that I understand it all better I would probably just use Vala and stick to GTK. Instead I switched to Tauri+Leptos+Thaw and it was a joy in comparison. Documentation was clear and I was just able to link my app to local framework code and debug whatever part I wanted. I was able to fix bugs in Tauri in first weeks of learning and I contributed quite a lot along the way.