On Thu, Apr 16, 2020 at 3:22 AM Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> > From: Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org>
> > Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> > Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2020 11:14:21 +0100
> >
> > Surely unifying under a single cross-platform toolkit like GTK+ would
> > avoid having this complexity.
>
> GTK+ is not cross-platform, it works only on some of the platforms we
> support (and is not an easy toolkit to work with, based on our
> experience).
>

I wrote a longer post about this topic on the emacs reddit recently, but a
short summary would be: What Eli said, plus some. There is no good
cross-platform GUI toolkit (free or otherwise), and the closest the
software world has today is Electron (which still doesn't cover everything
emacs supports). I realize that there are some partial solutions that
advertise themselves as cross-platform, but if you poke at them with a
moderately keen eye, they collapse quickly. As a practical matter, this is
a big reason that some of emacs' biggest competitors these days are based
on Electron (VS Code and Atom) and Java.

~Chad