Cross-platform GUI frameworks were hot in the 1990s.

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

Cross-platform GUI frameworks were hot in the 1990s. This review paper of platform-independent GUIs is interesting as it was published in January of 1995, just a few months before the original release of Java. The paper is a snapshot of the pre-Java market and covers mostly C/C++ products, plus one in Lisp (CLIM) and a couple based on Smalltalk.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/202642.202657

#gui #retrocomputing

[mikro2nd@indieweb.social]

@amoroso
Do you know of any similar paper/summary for now (ca. 2025)?

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@mikro2nd No, sorry.

[alavi@techhub.social]

@amoroso
cross platform GUI still sucks and we dont have many options

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@alavi I take refuge in Medley Interlisp and CLIM.

[mikro2nd@indieweb.social]

@amoroso
I've been looking for a cross-platform toolkit for (desktop!) UI lately, and it's thin pickings as far as I can see. Qt. Compose Multiplatform. Flutter. (But those latter 2 far prefer mobile platforms, and it shows!) It's a pretty sad scene. Everybody wants to do either web or mobile and to hell with desktop.

Me, I'm predicting a swing back to desktop over the next decade or so...

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@mikro2nd I'm lucky as I don't do anything cross-platform, and would use CLIM if I did.

[3rz@freiburg.social]

@amoroso is there a version without Cloudflare in front of it? My mobile can“t pass their “test”.

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@3rz That's weird as the page worked for me in Firefox up to a few tens of minutes ago, but now I get the warning too. I tried disabling uBO and Privacy Badger but I still get the warning, even in Chrome. Maybe a breaking update to Safe Browsing?

[tengkuizdihar@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@3rz @amoroso half of surface level internet is down because cloudflare is down

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@tengkuizdihar Thanks for the heads up.

@3rz

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@mikro2nd Does this 2016 post help?

https://blog.johnnovak.net/2016/05/29/cross-platform-gui-toolkit-trainwreck-2016-edition

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@mikro2nd This is more recent, 2019:

https://www.hohlerde.org/rauch/en/blog/2019-12-08-GUI-Frameworks/

[mikro2nd@indieweb.social]

@amoroso
Many thanks for the links. Both articles pretty-much confirm what I've seen to date: the state of cross-platform GUI is still dire in 2025. Perhaps I should write another blogpost? (No. I really can't offer as much depth as the articles did! :))

[amoroso@oldbytes.space]

@mikro2nd Or you can roll your own framework as this developer did in Common Lisp. 😀

https://tomscii.sig7.se/2025/04/The-Barium-Experiment

Jokes aside, I came across those links by reading this post. The author reached similar conclusions to the other posts and yours, but took a different road.