I really wanted to like Swing - despite it really being an overengineered mess, with some IDE GUI tools for creating UI layouts (a crutch that you might want to

I really wanted to like Swing - despite it really being an overengineered mess, with some IDE GUI tools for creating UI layouts (a crutch that you might want to use, given how messy the code-first approach would be), it was actually a passable way of creating cross-platform GUI apps. Though you'd still need JDK, which was a drawback (and it wouldn't look or feel native, but then again, at least it worked). JavaFX/OpenJFX, despite its advantages, somehow feels worse integrated into the development workflow that some people like me used to have. Never really got into GTK+ or Qt, or other tools that are more wieldy in the lower level languages, i'm afraid, though i'm sure that with enough time investment, bindings for other languages could be found and you could use them well enough. Though the closest i've seen to "easy" cross-platform GUI development that actually respects the underlying platform (unlike Electron), but that also doesn't make your hair go gray, was the way FreePascal + Lazarus handled it, by attempting to support multiple frameworks in a transparent manner, where possible ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Component_Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Component_Library ). Now, normally something like that would fail, since abstractions are leaky, but it seems like a number of useful pieces of software was actually written that way ( https://wiki.freepascal.org/Projects_using_Free_Pascal https://wiki.freepascal.org/Projects_using_Free_Pascal ). It's just sad that the language is kind of dead nowadays, as is the idea of having up-to-date tooling around it, or even many tools for developing web APIs. :/