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C++

Pros: Extreme performance. Low memory usage.
Cons: Fatal error is likely to crash whole the program, losing some data. Low extensibility (due to ABI incompatibility).

Qt

Cross-platform, awesome GUI library. Looks fairly very good on most platforms. Custom skin can be provided by the application. Graphics canvas supports OpenGL and GUI elements can be placed inside one, which means it's possible to use Qt as OpenGL-based GUI library for super-smoothly running application. However, the size of Qt library is somewhat large (roughly 10-100MB).

Gtk+

Cross-platform and mainly used by GNOME projects. Not as good as Qt from design perspective (personally). IME doesn't work well on OS X.

SDL

Helper library for games, but it can be used for other applications (i.e. XTBook). This actually doesn't include GUI toolkits, so we'll have to implement our own GUI library on SDL.

.NET (C#, F#, Nemerle, ...)

Pros: High performance. One binary runs on multiple platforms without recompilation (using Mono). High extensibility. Run-time plugin loading/unloading. High stability. Can switch multiple GUI libraries.
Cons: Somewhat higher memory usage.

System.Windows.Forms

Obsolete GUI library of .net Framework. Poor support by Mono (i.e. no IME, no visual styles, no native common dialogs).

WPF

Highly-designable complex and flexible GUI library developed by Microsoft. Only runs with Windows.

QtSharp (or similar thing)

.NET port for Qt.

Dynamically Typed Languages (Ruby, Python, node.js, ...)

Pros: Extreme extensibility due to its flexibility. Most part of the program doesn't need compilation.
Cons: No compile-time type checking, making it difficult to find bugs, leading to the potential instability. Slow. Difficult to install on Windows.

Languages/framework that I don't recommend

• Java - Java language still needs some modernization
• C - Low productivity.
• wxWidgets - Personally having a bad experience with Audacity on OS X.
• Haskell - Who uses it for a GUI-based complex project?
• BASIC - It's the 21th century now.
• Assembly - Too low portability / productivity.