Which GUI toolkits are best?

[Steve Maughan]

If you need cross platform development now then you're right - Delphi probably isn't the right solution. However most cross platform solution I find to be "clunky" compared to native applications so since most chess enthusiasts use Win32 why not develop for that platform?

In this day and age of terrabyte hard disks and fast internet connectivity I would *strongly* recommend static linking - simply provide another exe. In contrast dynamic linking (in my experience) just leads to support problems with conflicting version of dlls etc.

Just my opinion of course - you're welcome to disagree.

Cheers,

Steve

[ilari]

If you need cross platform development now then you're right - Delphi probably isn't the right solution. However most cross platform solution I find to be "clunky" compared to native applications so since most chess enthusiasts use Win32 why not develop for that platform?

There are many ways to develop for win32. Using WINAPI directly and dealing with HANDLEs, DWORDs, etc. is in my experience a lot clunkier than using something with more abstraction like Qt.
And why develop for other platforms? First of all, you'd be surprised how many computer chess addicts use Linux and/or Mac. Second, to most of us this is a hobby, and we may have strong preferences toward a particular OS (or a family of OSes). So market share isn't that important.

In this day and age of terrabyte hard disks and fast internet connectivity I would *strongly* recommend static linking - simply provide another exe. In contrast dynamic linking (in my experience) just leads to support problems with conflicting version of dlls etc.

Just my opinion of course - you're welcome to disagree.

I don't necessarily disagree - the pros and cons of static and dynamic linking are well known. It's a matter of preference, and also a matter of software platform. In the Windows world static linking is the norm. But most Linux distros have a good package management system, so dynamic linking makes more sense. And in some cases (eg. LGPL libraries) static linking can present legal problems for proprietary applications, regardless of platform.