> From: Alex Bennée <address@hidden>
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>, address@hidden
> 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