
Ask HN: What's the ultimate language/environment for developing GUI programs? - superdisk
I&#x27;m planning on developing a new personal project which involves a nontrivial GUI interface. I also want to do this project in the most comfortable way possible-- I&#x27;m open to new&#x2F;exotic languages or stacks which I&#x27;ve never used before. There doesn&#x27;t seem to be a perfect environment out there as they all have their drawbacks.<p>Here&#x27;s what I&#x27;ve considered:<p>- Pascal and Lazarus<p>The language isn&#x27;t the most expressive but it gets the job done. The UI toolkit (Lazarus) is hyped up a lot here but the documentation is <i>horrendous</i> and it seems to have DPI issues and a lack of good controls that I&#x27;d need. Creating new controls seems to be a nightmare. This is what I&#x27;m leaning towards right now anyway.<p>- Common Lisp and QTools<p>I haven&#x27;t given CL a proper spin yet and it looks super fun to work with. Unfortunately the QT bindings out there aren&#x27;t declarative or visual so it&#x27;s going to be a huge pain to do this. Not sure how creating new controls is going to be.<p>- Red and VID<p>(https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.red-lang.org&#x2F;?m=1)
I like this language and the declarative UI framework. However the language is in alpha and the docs are nonexistent. Not sure if this is viable.<p>- Smalltalk and Morphic<p>Cool language, but the resulting program is going to look super non-native and weird. A friend described it as looking like &quot;a fake operating system you see in TV shows&quot;. Also, the documentation is nonexistent.<p>- JavaScript and HTML<p>I&#x27;d prefer to not write JavaScript, and the resulting app is going to look really non-native or hodgepodge. Deploying on the web is sort of a plus, but at the end of the day I&#x27;d really rather not do this.<p>Does anybody know of the perfect language and setup for creating a classic GUI app in this day and age?
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9214
> Red ... docs are nonexistent

On the contrary, View and VID have moderately good reference documentation
[1]. Even if that's not enough for you, the community is always there to help
[2].

> Not sure if this is viable

To give you a rough understanding of what's possible, the implementation of
all 7GUIs [3] tasks in Red takes roughly 270 LOC [4]. There are plenty of
other examples at [5] and elsewhere.

[1]: [https://doc.red-lang.org/en/gui.html](https://doc.red-
lang.org/en/gui.html)

[2]: [https://gitter.im/red/help](https://gitter.im/red/help)

[3]: [https://eugenkiss.github.io/7guis](https://eugenkiss.github.io/7guis)

[4]: [https://github.com/9214/7guis-red](https://github.com/9214/7guis-red)

[5]: [https://github.com/red/code](https://github.com/red/code)

