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.

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hn_acc1 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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robinsonb5 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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hermitcrab 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>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.

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hn_acc1 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There is a small business licence.

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hermitcrab 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.