To be fair, GTK is pretty standard. This is so even for "big name" gc'd imperative languages such as C#. Sure, you can use Windows.Forms in C#, but you often wouldnt, because of the patent burden. Also, gtk in partnership with glade rocks! How easy is gtk to use from haskell by the way? In gc'd imperative languages, typically only one thread is allowed to communicate with the GUI, and you need to set up a whole bunch of message-parsing stuff to communicate with other threads. To what extent is this easier in Haskell? Other question on using gtk from haskell: how easy is it to integrate with glade? ie, can we directly bind glade form elements to haskell variables? How easy is it to bind events to glade form elements from within Haskell?