Who said C++ cannot be used for Rapid
Application Development (RAD) ? There are many GUI frameworks for C++,
which are even portable across Unix, Windows and others. One such
framework is wxWidgets.

wxWidgets lets developers create applications for Win32, Mac OS X, GTK+, X11, Motif, WinCE, and more using one codebase. It can be used from languages such as C++, Python, Perl, and C#/.NET. Unlike other cross-platform toolkits, wxWidgets applications look and feel native. This is because wxWidgets uses the platform’s own native controls rather than emulating them. It’s also extensive, free, open-source, and mature.

wxWidgets
is not just a GUI framework. It provides native support for threads,
sockets, database connectivity, synchronization and what else. Qt also
provides such support, but I like wxWidgets for its simplicity is
programming use.

There is a RAD development tool called wx-devcpp
hosted at sourceforge, which helps faster creation of Frames, Controls,
Dialogs and more. wx-devcpp has support for Visual Studio 2005
compilation as well along with MinGW compilation in Windows. I use
wx-devcpp for forms creations and import the generated source to VS6.0
in Windows and KDevelop in my Fedora 7. The surprise is, the code
compiles with very minimal changes from VS6.0 to KDevelop environment.
I have used wxWidgets with STLport 5.1 for my development purposes.