Portable GUI Frameworks
Published at 22:01 on 11 May 2026
I’ve been experimenting with them, because I have a need to rewrite a tool I use from Kotlin into some other programming language. Not because of any real defects in Kotlin (despite its proximity to the Java world and its associated JCA’s, this is not a show-stopper).
No, the problem is that I need to read HEIC files, and there is no good, easy way to do this in Kotlin, because there are simply no good, open-source, comprehensive, general-purpose imaging processing libraries available for the JVM. There are limited libraries that do not support HEIC nor the large size of the HEIC images I wish to read (such as the built-in stuff in the standard Java class library). There are esoteric libraries like ImageJ that support all sorts of oddball image formats used in the microscopy and health care fields, but not HEIC. There is no shortage of libraries that are abandonware and haven’t had an update in a decade or more.
By contrast, C# has Magick.NET and Python has Pillow, both of which do what I want. So I have been looking into GUI frameworks for those languages. Lets just say there are a lot of bad ones and leave it at that for now. I will post some details on the badness later (some of it is pretty mind-blowingly bad).
Suffice it to say that at this point I am reasonably sure wxPython will suit my needs, and it took a disgustingly long period of trial-and-error to get to that conclusion.