In this list, I’ll look at five cross-platform GUI toolkits that are programmed in C++, and are still under active development. You may never need to port your Windows application to Mac or Linux, but at least you know you can. Cross-platform toolkits shield you (somewhat) from those variations and oddities. Meanwhile, graphics on each operating system are done in completely different ways. Without cross-platform toolkits, you would need to do a substantial rewrite for any other platform just to handle the I/O and user interaction. Since then, Mac OS (and to a lesser extent, Linux) have since grown in importance compared to Windows, making it a better investment to create software that can run on all three platforms without requiring a rewrite. It wasn’t until the early ‘90s that graphical toolkits first appeared. Thirty years ago, all I/O was done on character displays. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that PC operating systems developed those sorts of user interfaces, and even after Windows and Apple’s various operating systems became the norm, event-driven programming took a few additional years to catch up. C++, like Python and many other programming languages,* does not come with a built-in graphical front end.
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