alt Hacker NewsThere are definitely a shortage of good GUI toolkits - making one is a huge undertaking. GTK is mediocre, as you discovered.
QtWidgets is extremely good though, even if it is effectively in maintenance mode.
Avalonia also seems good too though I haven't used it myself.
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hermitcrab • yesterday at 7:01 PM
Qt is still under very active development. Although there seems to be a lot more emphasis on QML than the widgets side of things for some time.
I've used Qt off and on, and it's generally worked as advertised. Although when drawing very short lines on a canvas way back when (~2004), it wouldn't do a great job and I had to hack in custom routines that did a much better job.
For prototyping / one-offs, I've always enjoyed working in Tcl/Itcl and Tk/Itk - object oriented Tcl with a decent set of widgets. It's not going to set the world on fire, but it's pretty portable (should mostly work on every platform with minor changes), has a way to package up standalone executables, can ship many-files-as-one with an internal filesystem, etc..
Of course, I spent ~15 years in EDA, so it's much more comfortable than for most people, but it can easily be integrated into C/C++ as well with SWIG, etc.