WxWidgets 3.2

#1

Post by todsacerdoti » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 5:34 AM UTC

WxWidgets 3.2
wxwidgets.org

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#2

Post by jarrell_mark » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 7:43 AM UTC

WxWidgets is like React Native but for desktops.

It uses the platforms' native UI frameworks. Gtk on Linux.

Audacity the audio editor uses WxWidgets.

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#3

Post by t0mas88 » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 7:55 AM UTC

I used this 15+ years ago with C++, it was so much easier to do cross platform things that way and it had good performance. Now I think I have not worked on a native desktop app on at least 10 years. And everything I see others make is more hybrid, javascript, electron kind of things. The performance of that even though we have much faster hardware feels worse than what WxWidgets / C++ did 15 years ago...

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#4

Post by ziotom78 » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 8:04 AM UTC

I have vivid memories of WxWidgets. I used it ~20 years ago to develop a program to browse a collection of artistic works (mainly sculptures and paintings) that was distributed on a CD (no internet at the time, this is the way knowledge was spread!). It was a bit clunky to use but extremely solid, and the end result was nice: it stored information in XML and displayed it in a window, letting the user to do simple searches and export images as JPG. I was able to seamlessly put in the same CD executables for Windows and for Linux, which was quite a big deal at the time.

A few years later (~2009), I used Qt to develop a big codebase that needed to be used on Windows, Linux, and Mac. It was admittedly nicer than WxWidgets, but my impression was that it was harder to understand what Qt did under the hood… It was as if Qt was trying to be more clever than the C++ compiler, while with WxWidgets it had always be more or less evident what the library was doing.

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#5

Post by 72deluxe » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 8:32 AM UTC

A truly excellent toolkit. The code is very readable and the developers are quick to communicate/respond on the forum or stackoverflow.

I wish more people used it instead of writing "apps" that are just a giant web browser with javascript and a hack to get menus working correctly, with fake UI widgets that don't respond like native window controls (no proper tab navigation, no moveable or resizeable dialogs, keyboard accelerators don't work).

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#6

Post by markdown » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 9:05 AM UTC

Bit of a tangent, but it's nice to see a project with a googlable name. If this were started today it would be called Avocado or Potato or something like that.

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#7

Post by tgv » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 9:18 AM UTC

t0mas88 wrote: post #3

I used this 15+ years ago with C++, it was so much easier to do cross platform things that way and it had good performance. Now I think I have not worked on a native desktop app on at least 10 years. And everything I see others make is more hybrid, javascript, electron kind of things. The performance of that even though we have much faster hardware feels worse than what WxWidgets / C++ did 15 years ago...

I wrote a (simple) accounting/billing application for my inlaws' shop some 20 years ago wih wxWidgets. I developed it on a mac, but it ran on a PC. The PC was very modest even back then (some 486, at best), but the application ran like lightning.

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#8

Post by ilaksh » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 10:09 AM UTC

You can still download the chess timer I made with wxWidgets like fifteen years ago. Apparently from this site https://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Miscellaneous/Chess-Tim... which I don't remember submitting it to.

The next result in Google is sketchy because it's a "crack" and that doesn't apply to shareware.

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#9

Post by kitd » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 10:12 AM UTC

markdown wrote: post #6

Bit of a tangent, but it's nice to see a project with a googlable name. If this were started today it would be called Avocado or Potato or something like that.

Potato Wedges has a nice ring though!

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#10

Post by wslh » Thu, Jul 07, 2022, 10:19 AM UTC

tgv wrote: post #7

t0mas88 wrote: post #3

I used this 15+ years ago with C++, it was so much easier to do cross platform things that way and it had good performance. Now I think I have not worked on a native desktop app on at least 10 years. And everything I see others make is more hybrid, javascript, electron kind of things. The performance of that even though we have much faster hardware feels worse than what WxWidgets / C++ did 15 years ago...

I wrote a (simple) accounting/billing application for my inlaws' shop some 20 years ago wih wxWidgets. I developed it on a mac, but it ran on a PC. The PC was very modest even back then (some 486, at best), but the application ran like lightning.

The same for a MS-DOS Clipper [1] application written 30 years ago. Sorry, with all due respect to the wxWidgets contributors, aesthetically wxWidgets (like many other UI libs) is not for 2022.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_(programming_language)