Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?

#41

Post by moder » Wed, Jan 07, 2009, 6:50 PM UTC

mcandre wrote: post #32

YelloSoft http://yellosoft.us/ I complain about the very same thing. There hasn't been a lot of development effort for building anything cross-platform. Out of fifty LISP implementations I looked at, only a few were cross-compatible. Hardly any computer games are multiplatform. I build my own software and release it on Mac, Linux, and Windows whenever possible. It's been really easy starting with a common code base (…

Have you tried Tk8.5? It looks like there have been some pretty substantial improvements since 8.4.

Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?

#42

Post by moder » Wed, Jan 07, 2009, 6:58 PM UTC

vorador wrote: post #35

I'm quite surprised to see that nobody has mentioned fltk ( http://fltk.org ). It is light, easy to use, and it uses a modified gpl license that allows linking against non-free code. And it has native look and feel too...

IIRC, FLTK had their 2.0 version in the works a long time ago ... and it just kept being in the works. They just never left their 1.x series. Was their redesign doomed to never replace 1.x?

Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?

#43

Post by wmf » Wed, Jan 07, 2009, 7:18 PM UTC

swombat wrote: post #15

tptacek wrote: post #10

You forgot Swing+Java/Jython/JRuby/Groovy/Clojure.

and AIR.

Too bad AIR gives up on native look and feel.

Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?

#44

Post by chrido » Wed, Jan 07, 2009, 7:23 PM UTC

use xul + xpcom

(powers firefox, songbird, miro, thunderbird, activestate commodo ....)

Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?

#45

Post by jimrandomh » Wed, Jan 07, 2009, 7:36 PM UTC

Where GUI toolkits are concerned, simplicity and C are mutually exclusive, because C just isn't a good language for them.

Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?

#46

Post by vorador » Wed, Jan 07, 2009, 8:38 PM UTC

statictype wrote: post #30

If you're really picky about the look-and-feel on each platform, just bite the bullet and write 3 front-ends. If you want something that looks reasonably good on major platforms, go with Qt or wx. There are a couple more options you have: XULRunner: I like this option because of the flexibility you get in creating UIs using markup and styles. You can get XULRunner built with Python support so you don't have to resort…

Yes, it is, wxWidgets is just a wrapper over the native libs.

Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?

#47

Post by gaius » Wed, Jan 07, 2009, 9:54 PM UTC

moder wrote: post #36

gaius wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How I wish I could forget Swing.

> How I wish I could forget Swing. Could you explain why? Last time I used Java ( years ago), Swing was supposedly replacing AWT. Swing seemed very large (certainly, judging by the page-count of all the Swing books on bookstore shelves), and required a lot of subclassing to use. When I tried it out, it was slow, to be sure, but it was also relatively easy to use. The layout managers worked well for my simple apps. I…

Like everything else Java, it just does everything in the most elaborate, baroque and top-heavy way it can. There are so many, so much better ways to build GUIs out there. That's what I meant in my comment about Java editors; you need an enormous amount of tool support to do anything useful in Java because of all the boilerplate you need. Tk on the other hand is an absolute pleasure to use, and I spend almost no time on my GUIs now, I can concentrate on my real code.

Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?

#48

Post by scumola » Wed, Jan 07, 2009, 10:25 PM UTC

coryrc wrote: post #7

wxWidgets is "big" because it has features. Considering it meets all your other criteria (aka features), in addition to ones you'll only find out you need halfway through a project, I would look closer at it. Use wxGlade and wxPython if you want easy, C++ if you demand compiled. Use dabo ( http://www.dabodev.com ) if you are interfacing with databases.

I've used wxWidgets for 7+ years now and loved it even in the early days when the GUI tools sucked and the OpenGL support was poor, but now it's very well polished and my choice for GUI development under linux. If my app needs to be ported to Windows, I just re-compile and it's all nice if I use the wxWidgets version of the network libs, etc ...

Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?

#49

Post by blableblable » Wed, Jan 07, 2009, 10:40 PM UTC

I have also run into this problem. I have tried at different moments in time Gtk, it's C++ bindings, wxWidgets, Java+AWT/Swing, Qt.

I couldn't agree more that all of them have major drawbacks. We need a good, simple to use, well-designed, fast cross-platform C library.

Do you care to start doing it? Other than doing your own, I think the most sensible choice is wxWidgets, which, from my point of view, only has one big problem: the API (i.e. code doesn't look pretty, bad C++ (no exceptions), and it can take a while to compile).

Re: Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?

#50

Post by est » Wed, Jan 07, 2009, 11:39 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #3

The current Tk (8.5 and above) looks a lot better, using native widgets where possible, and Starkit makes deployment of Tcl/Tk applications a breeze. Those who forget history are doomed to reimplement it.

is there a minimal, single dll version of Tk for Windows?