Which programming languages meet these criteria for GUI app development?

Question

I'm trying to find a programming language I feel really comfortable learning and using for desktop/GUI application development. I realize it's unlikely that any language meets ALL of these criteria, but I'd like to find one that meets as many as possible. I've listed the following features ROUGHLY in order from most desirable/important to least.

Ideal Language Features:

• Code Style: C/Java-like
• GUI Development: Easy, elegant, and platform-Native styling
• Community: Widely documented, active development, friendly & helpful, unity of focus
• Object-oriented
• Garbage Collection, no worrying about pointers, etc
• Native compilation, NO 3rd-party runtimes like GTK or .NET
• Multi-platform (can be compiled on *nix, Windows, Mac)
• Reasonably fast
• Mixed typing (soft-typed, OR both soft- and strict-typed -- i.e. Pike)

Background:

Most importantly, I need something that is straight foward and reasonably familiar, and something that isn't going to require a deep understanding of platform-specific APIs. I can't afford to spend a lot of time learning to develop Win32 apps in C++ for example. I've used wxWidgets, and liked the basic usage, but I'm really wanting to use a language with garbage collection, dynamic typing, and so on.

My frustration with Java, C#, and others is the need for a 3rd party runtime. I don't want end users to have to worry about installing and maintaining a separate platform.

Now then. Ideas??

Answer 1

UPDATE:

.NET is finally becoming an open-source, cross-platform solution. .NET Core allows native compilation for multiple devices.

The new .NET experience is exactly what I was looking for when I asked this question several years ago.

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Original:

Lots of good suggestions, despite being salted with negativity throughout.

I think I'm going to go with C# and Mono. I like C# well enough syntactically (I've been accused often of being shallow, but the syntax of a language is just as important to me as its features, because I spend a lot of time writing in that particular syntax). Although similar to Java, it has a few unique features that I appreciate, and I think the community seems more open-minded.

My biggest complaint about Java besides performance, frankly, is the community. It seems infected with an excess of arrogance, and it also seems to be very fragmented in terms of support for and development on various overlapping libraries, tools, and so on. The community surrounding Mono seems much more organized.

Actually, so does .NET itself, for that matter. Sun is a big enterprise company that seems every bit as confused about what it IS and what it DOES as Microsoft or IBM, yet they seem to be doing an even worse job of leading and organizing their platform than Microsoft, which is pretty tragic.