I mean, we can bitch as much as we want on what TQTC is doing with the open-source license mess, but their stock went from 8$ in 2018 to 100$ ...
http://www.nasdaqomxnordic.com/aktier/microsite?Instrument=H...
They acquired froglogic a couple days ago:
https://sdtimes.com/softwaredev/sd-times-news-digest-qt-acqu...
The imgui's are quite neat. I like the fact that building one of the demo's (with an impressive array of widgets) sort of 'just worked.' That's impressive, these days!
I suppose that's one of the reasons why Electron is so popular these days. If MacOS is constantly changing its APIs, that Microsoft can't seem to decide between classic Win32 and Modern UI, Linux that is split between Qt and GTK, plus all the mess on the mobile side.
Because OSes can't provide a consistent API, app ship with their their own OS! (a browser today is essentially an OS on top of an OS).
This. Even when targeting a single platform the developer may very well choose to use one of these frameworks just to avoid having to deal with the most horrible parts of the platform in question (and GUI's tend to be those parts.)
I use wx for my own stuff and also use a lot of wx-based applications. Wx is quirky and has some bugs but it's not going to go away or have a massive breaking change without warning. Its biggest weakness is the slow release schedule which leaves users waiting for a long time to access things that are critical on changing platforms (macos is a massive pain to support as the underlying system changes all the damn time). My opinion of it can be summarized as "the worst, except for all the others" so I keep using it.
I keep considering Qt whenever I start a new project and I'm still scared to use it. It's controlled by a company that is in really bad shape financially and has a history of attempting stupid things for short-term profit and screwing over customers. It's reasonable if you can manage with either just the LGPL components or if your entire project is GPL, but if not their license terms are really terrible and get worse and worse over time. They keep making changes that fuck over their paying customers. I don't feel good about using this at the moment. The KDE people have thankfully got that company by the balls with a watertight contract, and I totally trust the KDE people, but there's still plenty of damage the company can do, and every sign they will. It's really unfortunate because Qt is otherwise an excellent platform.
Multiplatform gtk is a pain. There are a few projects that successfully pull it off (Horizon EDA is a notable example) but I don't think I could manage it myself.
If you're doing a new thing you might want to consider one of the many imgui implementations (as you seem to be thinking in that direction already).