I'm currently writing a simple GUI application, Windows only, and i'm in need of a proper GUI lib.
Allegro just isn't the right tool for something like this.
Win32 API makes me sick.
WxWidgets is too heavy for my needs (2megs hello world is ridiculous)

The problem is that out there are simply too many libs, and i don't know which one is practical.

What is has to able to do:
-create new windows
-support window resizing

I'm looking for:
-native Windows look
-easy to support resizability
-either C or C++
-possibily lightweight

I'm NOT looking for:
-portability
-GUIs that will do also do networking, threads, and make you a coffee, i need a simple GUI

Ideas?

All of the stuff in that link is Allegro based (with the exception of WxWidgets), which i prefer to not use to avoid resolution based issues, and to be able to resize and maximize the program (which is very hard if you use Allegro).

Qt is nice, and you can just use GUI part of it if you want. There's also GTK...

IUP: http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/

As Simon, .NET is on almost every windows desktop nowadays so there is no need for a redistributable and it is so easy to produce lovely forms as it has built in anchoring/resizing, splitters, database operations, file handling, etc.

.NET.

I think C# does offer that. And programming in C# is not that hard to learn actually since you know C/C++. It's the switch to pure OO that may trip you up.

Surely .NET isn't a complete answer? Are you not then required to pick between Windows Forms and WPF?

If I have understood what's going on then I'd say WPF is likely to look a lot better. It seems to finally do away with Microsoft's trademark font nastiness.

1. If you know java, .net, php, etc. you know c#, however it isn't the language you need to learn, more the api. But if you get stuck, google usually finds the code you want.

2. yes, they have byte readers

Also, visual studio does the job of almost all your gui coding, so you only need to code your backend stuff.

C# uses .NET, yes. .NET isn't too bad to use once you get going, I taught myself C# and .NET without prior knowledge of either just by fiddling around in Visual C#. Once you get used to the naming conventions of .NET a little, you can just about guess what anything is named and how to use it, intellisense helps a lot in that aspect too.

Reading bytes isn't really low level, as others have said, that's fully possible in C#.

And as far as making your GUI, basically you design it and plugin the event code, all the low end GUI crap is done by VS.

If your tinkering with it now, just try and remember that almost everything you want to do with the gui will be configurable in the properties rather than requiring code, such as auto-resizing controls to fit the window, setting up splitter windows, etc.

I used to like Qt, but the restriction of signals/slots not being templates has started getting on my nerves. You can't connect anything else with Qt signals, and you can't use Boost with it because Qt has a "#define signals protected", and Boost has a namespace "signals".

The fact is there isn't a simple GUI library for C++ that:

a) offers GUI only and nothing else.

b) does not rely on preprocessing; Qt requires the MOC and wxWidgets requires writing macros for message maps.

c) follows C++ established principles, like using boost::shared_ptr or boost::bind.

d) has a simple interface; MFC is a mess, and also has message maps.

I don't think I can do that in version 3.0.5 (commercial, used for commercial purposes); it's in a later version.