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Are these two the only option ?

by hackermeows 5y ago

j-james 5y ago
Qt is another very popular toolkit, as long as you're not dead set on working in C.
- MichaEiler 5y ago
  Qt would have been my first choice for a long time. Unfortunately the Qt Company has changed their pricing model a few years ago and charges way too much these days. (3950$ per developer and year for desktop and mobile applications. For embedded systems they don't even list public prices...). That said even the open source version is less interesting since one doesn't get official long term security and bug fix updates without continuously migrating to the newest releases.
lordofgibbons 5y ago
Flutter for desktop also exists, but it's not ready for production use yet. It's buggy and missing features, but usable. My prediction is that we should be able to build prod-ready native desktop apps with it within a year or so
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
GTK, Qt, WxWidgets, FLTK are more or less your only choices for generic, long lived, cross-platform desktop GUI toolkits. I apologize for any that I've forgotten, except Tcl/Tk which is not seriously an option at this point in time :) There are some "promising new up and comers", including libUI. If you work in the audio software domain, JUCE is likely your go-to cross-platform toolkit.
- wahern 5y ago
  I settled for Yue: https://github.com/yue/yue https://github.com/yue/yue It's been around for several years, though definitely doesn't have the developer or user base of other well-known frameworks. The deciding factor for me was that is has well maintained Lua bindings as part of the core project, alongside JavaScript (Node.js) and C++. I didn't have much luck with libui (crashes, missing features, etc), and various immediate mode alternatives just require too many dependencies and other work that made integration painful. Plus, Lua bindings for these were always stale. In fact, Lua binding quality is pretty poor all around, including GTK, Qt, WxWidgets, and FLTK.
heavyset_go 5y ago
No. wxWidgets is cross-platform with GTK and Qt backends on Linux, and native platform widgets on macOS and Windows. QtQuick with QML is also pleasant, with a reactive programming model written in JavaScript. There's Kivy on Python. There are several IMGUI implementations, too. Some other lightweight Electron-like alternatives also exist.

Are these two the only option ?

j-james 5y ago

Qt is another very popular toolkit, as long as you're not dead set on working in C.

MichaEiler 5y ago
Qt would have been my first choice for a long time. Unfortunately the Qt Company has changed their pricing model a few years ago and charges way too much these days. (3950$ per developer and year for desktop and mobile applications. For embedded systems they don't even list public prices...). That said even the open source version is less interesting since one doesn't get official long term security and bug fix updates without continuously migrating to the newest releases.

lordofgibbons 5y ago

Flutter for desktop also exists, but it's not ready for production use yet. It's buggy and missing features, but usable. My prediction is that we should be able to build prod-ready native desktop apps with it within a year or so

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

GTK, Qt, WxWidgets, FLTK are more or less your only choices for generic, long lived, cross-platform desktop GUI toolkits. I apologize for any that I've forgotten, except Tcl/Tk which is not seriously an option at this point in time :) There are some "promising new up and comers", including libUI. If you work in the audio software domain, JUCE is likely your go-to cross-platform toolkit.

wahern 5y ago
I settled for Yue: https://github.com/yue/yue https://github.com/yue/yue It's been around for several years, though definitely doesn't have the developer or user base of other well-known frameworks. The deciding factor for me was that is has well maintained Lua bindings as part of the core project, alongside JavaScript (Node.js) and C++. I didn't have much luck with libui (crashes, missing features, etc), and various immediate mode alternatives just require too many dependencies and other work that made integration painful. Plus, Lua bindings for these were always stale. In fact, Lua binding quality is pretty poor all around, including GTK, Qt, WxWidgets, and FLTK.

heavyset_go 5y ago

No. wxWidgets is cross-platform with GTK and Qt backends on Linux, and native platform widgets on macOS and Windows. QtQuick with QML is also pleasant, with a reactive programming model written in JavaScript. There's Kivy on Python. There are several IMGUI implementations, too. Some other lightweight Electron-like alternatives also exist.