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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

Building graphical interfaces in C feels like carving a tree with a knife

Now, building them in C++ feels like carving a tree with a power drill. Better, but still not the right tool

And GTK makes C feel like C++, the bad parts I mean, without the good ones.

I think Android does it in a good way, browsers also made it easier to create nice interfaces, not sure how it works in IOS though.

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I will vouch for your comment. I recently tried to knock up a simple GTK+ UI for something and it was utterly painful.

You can write GTK+ in pretty much any language, so if it was painful, you chose the wrong one.

I don't know. Take QT for example, I'm happy to risk blowing my leg off with c++ just because I feel really productive with Qt, it truly is a wonderfully productive library, and the external ecosystem is supportive, whatever complex visualisation I want to draw, I can often find a lib that's happy to draw into a qpixmap - c++ on its own or with boost etc. doesn't leave me feeling as productive.

GTK feels drawn out to me in comparison.

Exactly

Some libraries manage to iron out the difficulties of the language. QT and WxWidgets are examples of that.

GTK (on C) and Windows MFC are examples of how libraries can make it harder on the user.

I tried python and c. Both were horrid.

For writing GTK apps the language Vala seems like a good choice. It's a C# like language whose object system uses glib objects underneath the hood, this makes object-oriented C code (as required by GTK) look like a modern object-oriented language.

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