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There are definitely a shortage of good GUI toolkits - making one is a huge undertaking. GTK is mediocre, as you discovered. QtWidgets is extremely good though

There are definitely a shortage of good GUI toolkits - making one is a huge undertaking. GTK is mediocre, as you discovered. QtWidgets is extremely good though, even if it is effectively in maintenance mode. Avalonia also seems good too though I haven't used it myself.

hermitcrab 6mo ago
Qt is still under very active development. Although there seems to be a lot more emphasis on QML than the widgets side of things for some time.
- IshKebab 6mo ago
  Yes QtQuick/QML is under active development. QtWidgets is not really.
hn_acc1 6mo ago
I've used Qt off and on, and it's generally worked as advertised. Although when drawing very short lines on a canvas way back when (~2004), it wouldn't do a great job and I had to hack in custom routines that did a much better job. For prototyping / one-offs, I've always enjoyed working in Tcl/Itcl and Tk/Itk - object oriented Tcl with a decent set of widgets. It's not going to set the world on fire, but it's pretty portable (should mostly work on every platform with minor changes), has a way to package up standalone executables, can ship many-files-as-one with an internal filesystem, etc.. Of course, I spent ~15 years in EDA, so it's much more comfortable than for most people, but it can easily be integrated into C/C++ as well with SWIG, etc.
- robinsonb5 6mo ago
  > I've always enjoyed working in Tcl/Itcl and Tk/Itk In the near future I need to lash up a windows utility to generate a bunch of PDF files from a CSV (in concert with GhostScript), with specific filenames. I was trying to figure out the best approach and hadn't even considered Tcl and Tk - with Itcl you might have just given me a new rabbithole to explore! Thanks! (...I think!)
  - hn_acc1 6mo ago
    I hope it works out! It's amazing how far Tcl/Tk has come since I "had" to use it as a wrapper around an X11 window back on an SGI Irix, using Tcl scripting to interface to an OpenGL backend. I think that was like 7.3.x or something in 1994. And it was pretty cool back then already! The team around Tcl is small, but dedicated and brilliant, IMHO.
- hermitcrab 6mo ago
  >Although when drawing very short lines on a canvas way back when (~2004), it wouldn't do a great job and I had to hack in custom routines that did a much better job. QCanvas (or was it QGraphicsCanvas?) has long since been replace with QGraphicsScene, which is much more capable and doesn't suffer from pixelation issues.
  - hn_acc1 6mo ago
    Probably. We paid thousands / year for the developer seat in our startup, and in the end, it wasn't great. I did manage to make the Tcl/Tk event loop and the Qt event loop work together, so we could have Tk windows inside a Qt app!
    - hermitcrab 6mo ago
      There is a small business licence.

hermitcrab 6mo ago

Qt is still under very active development. Although there seems to be a lot more emphasis on QML than the widgets side of things for some time.

IshKebab 6mo ago
Yes QtQuick/QML is under active development. QtWidgets is not really.

hn_acc1 6mo ago

I've used Qt off and on, and it's generally worked as advertised. Although when drawing very short lines on a canvas way back when (~2004), it wouldn't do a great job and I had to hack in custom routines that did a much better job. For prototyping / one-offs, I've always enjoyed working in Tcl/Itcl and Tk/Itk - object oriented Tcl with a decent set of widgets. It's not going to set the world on fire, but it's pretty portable (should mostly work on every platform with minor changes), has a way to package up standalone executables, can ship many-files-as-one with an internal filesystem, etc.. Of course, I spent ~15 years in EDA, so it's much more comfortable than for most people, but it can easily be integrated into C/C++ as well with SWIG, etc.

robinsonb5 6mo ago
> I've always enjoyed working in Tcl/Itcl and Tk/Itk In the near future I need to lash up a windows utility to generate a bunch of PDF files from a CSV (in concert with GhostScript), with specific filenames. I was trying to figure out the best approach and hadn't even considered Tcl and Tk - with Itcl you might have just given me a new rabbithole to explore! Thanks! (...I think!)
- hn_acc1 6mo ago
  I hope it works out! It's amazing how far Tcl/Tk has come since I "had" to use it as a wrapper around an X11 window back on an SGI Irix, using Tcl scripting to interface to an OpenGL backend. I think that was like 7.3.x or something in 1994. And it was pretty cool back then already! The team around Tcl is small, but dedicated and brilliant, IMHO.
hermitcrab 6mo ago
>Although when drawing very short lines on a canvas way back when (~2004), it wouldn't do a great job and I had to hack in custom routines that did a much better job. QCanvas (or was it QGraphicsCanvas?) has long since been replace with QGraphicsScene, which is much more capable and doesn't suffer from pixelation issues.
- hn_acc1 6mo ago
  Probably. We paid thousands / year for the developer seat in our startup, and in the end, it wasn't great. I did manage to make the Tcl/Tk event loop and the Qt event loop work together, so we could have Tk windows inside a Qt app!
  - hermitcrab 6mo ago
    There is a small business licence.