[byuu]

> I kind of wonder why nobody has written a library that acts as a thin layer around and abstraction of native UI toolkits

That's what I'm working on. Targeting C++, calling it hiro. So far, I have Windows, GTK, Qt and a dormant Cocoa layer. It truly uses native widgets (although I had no choice but to use custom draw on the Windows ListView), it compiles to ~50-100KB, it uses a fully shared memory model (reference counted) so you never have to call new or delete on anything, uses C++11 so you can bind lambda callbacks, and it uses UTF-8 ubiquitously, even on Windows. So no more L"foo" strings and W function variants.

I've been working on it for several years now, but it's still somewhat in flux. I hope to get a stable API version along with documentation out this year. If anyone really wants to see it right now, take a look at higan and the source to its UI.

[CyberDildonics]

I actually downloaded and tried it out as a test. It worked pretty well (for the window and button I created). Keep up the good work! Modern C++ makes a lot of old things new again. Also, although you probably know of it, look up fltk, it was originally written with same goals (and it accomplished them) albeit in C.

[byuu]

Neat, thank you for trying it! It's in a bad state right now with zero examples/documentation. Plus the move to shared ownership was done this year, and has required massive rewrites (Windows/GTK finished, Qt underway, Cocoa not started.)

(I can't begin to express how unbelievably difficult it was to force a fully shared ownership model onto Windows, GTK, Qt, etc. That took several months of effort and is really complex behind the scenes.)

So I don't have much to show off, but I'd really like to get feedback on making the API cleaner and more consistent; as once a stable 1.x series is released, we'll be stuck with any poor choices that were missed for a long time.

I'll try and finish the Qt port, get some basic documentation up, and share it on HN then as a 0.x beta release.

FLTK definitely seems interesting, but seems to use its own widgets instead of being a wrapper around the native platform ones. This has pros (consistency and flexibility) and cons (they stand out as looking non-native.)

I've strongly considered a raster-based backend to my toolkit as well (for things like running apps directly on a framebuffer, or what have you), but have held off so far because it's undoubtedly a massive undertaking. Even if I do go this route, I'll surely write a hiro wrapper for this as well.

[wolfgke]

FLTK is written in C++ (though not C++11 style).

[0xFFC]

FLTK is C++ library not C.CMIIW

[mkesper]

Did you consider a web layer?