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Comment by jstimpfle | Hacker News Reader

> via RPC... or declarative YAML.

or CORBA...

More seriously. I'm not too familiar with Qt, but when I had to do a project in it I really hated how anti-modular it was. While it gets high praise from many people, I don't think it's possible to write sane software in it. It's bloat. Even though MFC (which I have to fight currently) is probably worse.

Instead, what we need is a simple API with opaque handles and C function calls. No fancy OOP or macro preprocessors. Simple OpenGL style. At least regarding portability, OpenGL made sane choices I think.

Immediate Mode GUI (IMGUI) has been a trend in the last years, and there are a few popular libraries like DearImGUI, but my impression is they are optimized for quick-and-dirty work. It seems that control and clarity is traded away for small local reductions of keystrokes.

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> Instead, what we need is a simple API with opaque handles and C function calls. No fancy OOP or macro preprocessors. Simple OpenGL style.

Something like the enlightenment foundation libraries might be what you want[1]. I haven't tried it out properly, but I liked the look of it from the docs, it's a C api and moderately minimalistic.

However, even with C APIs, all these things end up with something like "fancy OOP" (after all, even Gtk is a C Api). That's because GUI widgets seem to be one of the few places really well suited to OO ideas like inheritance and non-trivial getter-setters.

[1]: https://docs.enlightenment.org/efl/current/

> However, even with C APIs, all these things end up with something like "fancy OOP" (after all, even Gtk is a C Api). That's because GUI widgets seem to be one of the few places really well suited to OO ideas like inheritance and non-trivial getter-setters.

How much of the GObject system is there for the benefit of Gtk and C developers and how much is there for interop with other languages and gui builders though? Programming against the C API it seems to be very much not OOP, you're always casting to a base class to call methods on that level, it doesn't appear that the OO system is used much internally.

Xlib Athena Widgets, OpenLook, and CDE were also pretty much OOP in C.

> Instead, what we need is a simple API with opaque handles and C function calls. No fancy OOP or macro preprocessors. Simple OpenGL style. At least regarding portability, OpenGL made sane choices I think.

FLTK [0] might fit some of this, at the cost of being somewhat ugly.

[0] https://www.fltk.org/

Qt is the industry standard for software in the computer graphics industry. It's definitely easy to write big applications with it and imho its very easy to work with.

Of course YMMV, but i wouldn't discount it

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