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I am missing an important part in this discussion: The absolute lack of a stable API for GUIs.

Command line tools, web servers, ... are easy: Take POSIX and be a bit conservative with the edge cases. It will work with a recompile for most linux distros,BSDs, OSX and if you're willing to look at e.g. cygwin, even windows. I had to compile an ancient linux 1.x program last month, and it works.

The GUI world however is a different beast. There is X11 which only offers the most basic of primitives for drawing and pointing, nothing decent for text, and the API designers want to take away even that with wayland. There is GTK that actively does not want to provide any form of stability. There is QT which has a hard-to-interop C++ API and every major version breaks everything once more. And i haven't said anything of the licenses

This means no community investment can be made in Linux GUI's: Every year or so, you have to do serious upgrades or a GUI application simply perishes. Which is basically insane. It means that whatever Linux GUI exists today is temporary for everything but the biggest applications.

Ironically, win32 is the only reasonable option on Linux: wine will provide a good enough environment, and as they are anchored API-wise to microsoft, they can guarantee they'r there for the long term.

But how I dream for a posix-like API that both GTK and QT could provide.




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