More geeking...

[noahgibbs]

I'm looking at writing some simple cross-platform GUI stuff, probably in C. Well, probably in C++ since all the decent cross-platform GUI libraries seem to require it.

Other than FLTK (which looks pretty good) and GTK+ (which sorta works on Windows, but it's not clear how well), anybody got any recommendations for a toolkit that will do (at a minimum) Linux and most common Windows flavors?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

FLTK is okay. It's small and fast in the way that GUI toolkits should be. Their commitment to static linking makes me happy. It's been quirky for me on Windows (compiled via cygwin), but I don't know how indicative that is. Maybe it works great when compiled with VC++.

By the way, I can't get myself to stomach FLTK because I really hate its callback system. Specifically, callbacks are C function pointers, which means they can't point to non-static methods. If your code is likely to be OO, you'll find yourself writing static methods that decode void pointers and then call the methods you really wanted to call in the first place.

I really favor typesafe callback systems that know how to connect to either methods or functions. gtk-- has one, encapsulated in libsig++. It looks decent, but I swallowed the C++ template pill long ago. I'm a bit leary of gtk--, since it's just a C++ wrapper around gtk+. Side projects that try to keep alternate interfaces to active projects scare me.

Qt is very highly regarded in its cross-platformness, but as you say, it's not as free on some of the platforms, which makes it, in effect, not cross-platform. It does have a nice callback system, but it forces you to run a preprocessor on your code.

There's nothing out there that makes me happy. You're less unreasonably picky than me, so maybe you'll see through the flaws and find something that works. If you do, lemme know.

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

You're less unreasonably picky than me,

Bwah-hahahahaha!

Um, I mean, that's kind of a matter of opinion.

The other big possibilities that I've seen are the FOX toolkit and wxWindows. Haven't looked into either one enough to know whether I'll like it, though early signs on wxWindows aren't promising.

[msde.livejournal.com]

I think wxwindows was what my coworker used. It was a huge pain in the butt, because he used it just so he could program in C. The rest of the project was VBA. It did seem to handle basic gui components tolerably well though.

Hmm. a couple minutes with google suggests that wxwindows is the way to go if you already have a code base written using MFC. My suspicion is that writing for windows with the intent of porting to linux might be the way you have to go.

Whoops! Now that I think about it, I think he was using wxWidgets. http://www.wxwidgets.org/ I remember him complaining that it was a huge library and he wasn't able to just use part of it.

How complicated is the gui going to be? It might be easier to just write two?

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

The GUI won't be too complicated, but maintaining two mostly-seperate versions would be kind of a pain... We'd be talking complexity on the order of the LiveJournal web client -- so, y'know, big but not all that complicated.

wxWidgets is apparently just a rename of wxWindows. So it's basically the same thing. Yeah, it looks like a pain for that reason among others.

I actually have barely used MFC before, but I was distinctly unimpressed. In any case, this'll all be written from scratch unless I find something similar to base it off. I'm not optimistic about finding such a thing.