[Mono-list] Cross-Platform GUI Tookit

[Daniel Hughes]

The Qyoto bindings are well out of date, they do not support qt5, they
are pretty much unmaintained, they are not packages for linux and
there is not a single opensource project (that I know of) using them.

The GTK bindings are stuck on GTK2, Xamarin has no interest in GTK3
because they want to use native gui tookits on Windows and Mac and
linux is not a supported platform for their commercial tools so they
have no interest in it. There are community produced bindings for GTK3
but these are not released as stable yet despite it being years since
GTK3 was released.

Winforms is rubbish on both linux and Mac and unlikely to get any better.

WPF is windows only and is not opensource and is it seems unlikely to
be any time soon.

Xamarin.Forms is mobile only so is not supported on Linux, Mac or even
Windows Desktop.

Xwt is immature, has limited widget support, Is largely unproven
(nothing is using it, except maybe a very little in MonoDevelop) and
is abandoned (no commits for 11 months)

If you want to produce a cross platform app your best bet is to use an
architecture (MVC or similar) which allows you to use a native GUI
toolkit on each plaform. This is what I ended up with in my project
WideMargin, WPF on windows GTK on linux. I started with GTK on both
window and Linux but it look an performed very badly on windows.



On Sun, Nov 16, 2014 at 3:35 PM, Miguel de Icaza <miguel at xamarin.com> wrote:
>>
>> Windows.Forms is the oldest and junkiest thing available, even on Windows.
>> It's even worse on mono because it's buggy, and worse still on OSX because
>> it requires X11.
>
>
> On Windows it is quite decent, it is a thin layer on top of the native Win32
> API.   So if you want a simple Win32 app, it is ideal.
>
> On Mac, you are slightly wrong.   There are two backends.   An X11 backend
> and a Cocoa backend, so you do not need X11 to run those app,
>
> That said, it contains both bugs as well as limitations based on the light
> Win32 emulation.
>
>>
>
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