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Comment by laurentoget | Hacker News Reader

These APIs are notoriously hard to get right and coherent, and releasing at such an early stage will make it hard to change anything when building up on this.

That said I do not know of any cross platform library in C, so this does seem to fill a niche.

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> releasing at such an early stage will make it hard to change anything when building up on this.

Why? Release early and get feedback. Backward compatibility isn't holy. And it's just an alpha. No one expects the api to be stable.

there's iup [http://webserver2.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/] if you only want linux and windows. pleasant-to-use chicken scheme bindings too.

Plus it's MIT licensed. You can fork this easily and maintain its behavior the way it suits whatever you're building even if the upstream changes in breaking ways.

Umm, Gtk?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but GTK isn't really native on anything but Gnome. Instead apps are just skinned to (mostly) look like each platform.

Yes. GTK on Windows is borderline useless unless you pour significant effort into optimizing your program for it; and under OSX no amount of effort will make it feel anywhere close to native.

I wonder how Deluge looks/feels on Windows or OS X. I've heard only good things about its native looks, but haven't ever used it on anything but Linux.

It looks OK, but it is easy to see that it is not native: http://i1-win.softpedia-static.com/screenshots/Deluge_1.png

Gtk (at least from 3 onwards) doesn't even aim to be cross-desktop on Linux, let alone cross-platform. Meaning, your gtk apps will always look and behave according to the Gnome conventions on all platforms, which could be what you want, depending on what cool-aid you're drinking ;) .

Gtk doesn't use native controls. While grandparent didn't mention that detail, I think it's the deciding factor here.

what about http://webserver2.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/

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