Simplicity
Graphical toolkits vary in many ways and each has various pros and cons in their design and implementation. This page aims to look at the simplicity of various toolkits. The aim is to try and capture the simplicity of development and also, somehow, end-user ease of use.
The first comparison is in source code complexity. Each of these examples is for a simple "Hello World" application that contains a label and a quit button. The Go language was used for all to try and be fair. Each of these toolkits aim to create cross-platform applications that compile from a single codebase.
| Toolkit | Lines of Code | Characters | Complexity† |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fyne | 18 | 304 | 1 |
| Andlabs UI | 28 | 513 | 2 |
| GTK+ | 27 | 468 | 1 |
| Qt | 30 | 622 | 1 |
| Shiny* | 93 | 2383 | 4 |
| Nuklear | 80 | 1696 | 5 |
* The Shiny toolkit does not define a button so we had to build a simple implementation. Whilst harsh it seems realistic to expect that most applications would need a button of some sort.
† https://github.com/fzipp/gocyclo
Please feel free to add your own examples to this list. Also suggesting more realistic ways to measure complexity would be helpful!