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Comment by yellowapple | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that last justification is one with which I wholeheartedly disagree. Cross-platform done right is a good thing, and yet here we have Apple explicitly describing how it wants app developers to not use cross-platform technologies and instead rely on Apple-specific interfaces. In other words: "screw developer productivity, if you're not exclusively targeting our platforms, you're doing it wrong".

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Is there an example of "cross-platform done right"? I have yet to see a case where an app is able to both exploit the depth of every devices capability and the breadth of multiple hardware and software configurations, without becoming a platform unto itself. I'm not saying cross-platform isn't possible, but "done right" is a pretty vague target to hit.

Cross-platform done right is a unicorn that doesn't exist.

What's a good cross-platform toolkit that exists today?

Depends on your end goal. But I'd say Tk/Tcl and Qt have done alright for themselves. They'll never be confused for native, but for a solid GUI app, they're quite solid.

Then there's always Unity ...

I'm a Qt programmer. It's very very good because it attempts to look as much as possible like a native app rather than forcing a "cross-platform look and feel" like Google has been doing lately.

But it still feels wrong on the Mac. Little UI details which just "aren't done" on the Mac. Plus Qt is always a year or two behind on everything means that when MacOS alters or refines a UI element that Qt apps will still be doing things the old way.

Tcl/Tk. Yeah, I worked with it for several years. It was great to work with and highly underrated.

Safe to say I would never write a commercial consumer facing app with that.

Opengl

That’s pretty low level and I don’t think most people would consider that a toolkit.

Definitely Unity.

wxWidgets

libui looks amazing but it's not quite ready yet https://github.com/andlabs/libui

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