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Cross-Platform GUI Toolkits (Again)?

Posted by Cliff on from the windows-on-as-many-OSes-as-possible dept.

Futurepower(R) queries: "It has been 2 1/2 years since the previous Ask Slashdot about GUI Toolkits. There were many helpful comments then, such as this one. Since then, Slashdot has discussed wxWindows vs. MFC and considered the book, Creating Applications with Mozilla. The best comparison table is apparently still the GUI Toolkit, Framework Page. Which is the best cross-platform GUI toolkit that provides native look and feel? Which is the best overall? What IDEs and other tools do you use? What are the problems?" Slashdot also had a match-up between GTK+ and Qt, but some of you might have missed that one. How have recent changes in this ballpark changed your feelings on the issue?

3 of 514 comments (clear)

  1. The web? by Gary+Franczyk · · Score: 0, Troll

    Well, until Microsoft took it over, the Web was a very good multi-platform development environment....

  2. GUI/IDE flaw by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    From the article: The best comparison table is apparently still the GUI Toolkit, Framework Page. Which is the best cross-platform GUI toolkit that provides native look and feel? Which is the best overall? What IDEs and other tools do you use? What are the problems?

    GUI toolkits and IDEs could be exploited if widely used.

    Ken Thompson who we all know and love from UNIX lore has written Reflections on Trusting Trust which describes just this problem.

    Imagine that you insert a backdoor into a compiler, so that everything the compiler compiles is trojaned. If the compiler detects that it is recompiling itself, it quietly reinserts the trojan code. The actual source code to the trojan might be wiped out, but as long as you are running infected binaries, it will keep popping up again and again.

    From the paper: "First we compile the modified source with the normal C compiler to produce a bugged binary. We install this binary as the official C. We can now remove the bugs from the source of the compiler and the new binary will reinsert the bugs whenever it is compiled. Of course, the login command will remain bugged with no trace in source anywhere."

    A very interesting read.

  3. I be happy to read 50 more pages... by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 0, Troll


    You said, "I hope the reply wasn't too long."

    I'd be happy to read 50 more pages like you wrote.