Andrew Kuchling writes:
Careful... while people may try to port GTk+ to Windows, porting GNOME is a different kettle of wax, because GNOME needs GTk+ but also entails gnome-libs
But I was never seriously advocating Gtk+ on Windows. This was just a footnote. I shouldn't have even mentioned the Windows Gtk+ port because it just muddied the water. The major point I was trying to make is that toolkits like Tkinter and WxWindows, which try to delegate to the native widget sets whenever possible, will succeed, and toolkits like Galaxy/AWT/Swing/XPFE, which reimpliment all the widgets from scratch, are doomed to fail. (IMO, of course). What I believe we need is a suitable abstraction which uses MFC on MS-Win platforms and Gtk+ on Unix. And which also doesn't, due to the abstraction, take away too many features. I don't know that much about MFC, but for a simple example - Gtk+ offers an option for its canvas widget to do all drawing in antialised mode (by the way, this is slow but produces very nice looking results). It would be a shame if the abstraction layer didn't allow for things like this to be used.
This is why, every time this debate comes up, we end up sticking with Tk; it may suck, but all the other systems don't support everything...
Right. FWIW, in my day-to-day work, if it has to run on MS-Win I use Tkinter, and if MS-Win is not an issue I use PyGtk. Fermilab will be showing some network monitoring software at the Supercomputing 2000 conference next month, and it's mostly all stuff I whipped up a few days using Tkinter.