[Mono-list] Cross-Platform GUI Tookit

[Daniel Hughes]

QtSharp doesn't look ready for use yet.

Here is the requirement for a GUI toolkit to be ready for use.

1. Works and is stable on all target platforms
2. Is packaged for all platforms (that means that on linux rpm and deb
packages are included in the repositories of the Major distros) and
pre-built binaries are available for windows and mac.
3. Supports the latest major version of the toolkit.

There is not a single GUI tool kit which meets these three
requirement. Not even a single one.


On Sun, Nov 16, 2014 at 9:18 PM, João Matos <ripzonetriton at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
>
> Check out QtSharp, which is being developed by the same developer behind the
> Qyoto project.
>
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 16, 2014 at 5:00 AM, Daniel Hughes <trampster at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> The Qyoto bindings are well out of date, they do not support qt5, they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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>> >
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>
>
>
>
> --
> João Matos