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Message: <blockquote data-quote="drothgery" data-source="post: 1951337" data-attributes="member: 360">I hate to be the one throwing cold water on your ambitions here, but you've got some incompatible goals.You can't have rapid development and quality multi-platform development at the same time; quality multi-platform development (where the idiosynracies of individual platforms are catered to, not brushed over) is hard, slow, and not something that inexperienced programmers (or even seasoned professionals) should attempt lightly. Cross-platform toolkits can make it easier to build things that run on multiple platforms, and even run with acceptable performance (which is relatively new; ten years ago, when I was a CS student instead of a professional programmer, the thought of getting acceptable performance with a cross-platform GUI would have been amusing; also, ten years ago I liked C++, whereas now I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole). But at the end of the day, you'll still end up with something that feels like a Mac app on Windows, or a Windows app on Linux.You can't use the best tools for a project of this type (C#/VB.NET or Java; Python would be capable, but the available IDEs just aren't anywhere near as good and they're just not as a widely used, so finding example code is more difficult) and build something that will be embraced by the mainline OSS community, which has almost no significant projects written in something other than C (Mozilla is in C++, and there a few others, but most of the big OSS projects are written in C).You'll absolutely want1) Automatic memory management, because there's nothing more frustrating in programming than tracking down pointer errors, and in any modern language (which is to say pretty much anything except C or C++) you don't have to.2) Strong standard networking libraries. Low-level networking code is messy. Don't write it if you don't have to.3) Strong standard XML libraries. Doing XML processing right is a black art; let someone else do the work of getting it right.4) Strong standard string libraries. Anything with a lot of user interaction does a ton of text processing.5) Strong standard GUI libraries, for obvious reasons.... and that's going to restrict your choices pretty quickly.</blockquote>

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