developing GUI application without using GUI toolkit

Question

Is it possible to write GUI application without using GUI toolkit ? As the GUI toolkit like GTK+ itself is written in c language, when there were no such toolkits at starting so how could programmers developed GUI apps only using c or c++ without using such toolkits? How can one write Gui application in c or c++ without using any GUI toolkit?

Answer 1

You can program Windows GUI applications using the Win32 API directly, without using any separate toolkit like GTK+. One reference on how to do that is here: http://www.winprog.org/tutorial/start.html

It's not so common these days, and not for the faint of heart.