Re: GTK+ 3, Win32 and GtkApplication (DBus woes)

[Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 7:26 AM, Kean Johnston <kean johnston gmail com> wrote:
>Considering what a long history Gtk+ has of being
> very portable,

I would say that this is a subtle mis-perception. GTK's support for
non *nix, non-X11 platforms has happened generally inspite of, rather
than because of any central portability goal. Its been implemented by
very small numbers of dedicated individuals for each platform, and is
frequently broken for relatively short periods of time as the
internals of GTK change. It is true that GTK is becoming *more*
portable as a result of the design changes we've seen in the last 2
years, and that this will continue. Its also at least as portable as
anything else with its power and flexibility. But for some reason, its
quite easy to get the idea that GTK was actually designed as a
cross-platform toolkit, which is manifestly not true. Luckily, we've
had people like Tor on the windows side and an assorted bunch of
people for os x that have done the work of making it work on other
platforms *anyway*. But even with such heroic efforts, there continue
to be things that are not quite the way they should be on non-X11
platforms, and depending on what your app does, these may be
completely ignorable or showstoppers.

--p