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WxWidgets 3.2

wxwidgets.org

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Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#21

Post by diego_moita »

wxWidgets has a sublime idea: an api that is just a wrapper over native controls. For cross platform frameworks it is fast and light. The very opposite of bloatware.

But it also has a terrible flaw: its heavy-templated C++ api, hard to port to other languages.

I don't want to get stuck on C++. I want to use Go and Rust. And all the wxWidgets ports to those languages suck, big time.

Show me a solid wxWidgets for Rust and I'll fall in love again. Yes, I'd also colaborate on that project, too.

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#22

Post by IYasha »

jarrell_mark wrote: post #2

WxWidgets is like React Native but for desktops. It uses the platforms' native UI frameworks. Gtk on Linux. Audacity the audio editor uses WxWidgets.

Yeah, I love the idea too. I'm glad they're working on the wxQt backend too! Invaluable for KDE users.

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#23

Post by IYasha »

diego_moita wrote: post #21

wxWidgets has a sublime idea: an api that is just a wrapper over native controls. For cross platform frameworks it is fast and light. The very opposite of bloatware. But it also has a terrible flaw: its heavy-templated C++ api, hard to port to other languages. I don't want to get stuck on C++. I want to use Go and Rust. And all the wxWidgets ports to those languages suck, big time. Show me a solid wxWidgets for Rust…

Why so negative, yo? If you don't want to get stuck on C++, stick to C! )

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#24

Post by gaze »

Many people don’t know about XRC, which allows you to describe a window in an XML document much like HTML. It can be edited and live reloaded. Wonderful feature.

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#25

Post by amelius »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #19

WxWidgets is nice, used it in the past at one ocasion. It's just that I don't have any desire to touch anything C/C++. If it had a Java wrapper so I can use it with Clojure, it would be another topic.

The python binding is very popular.

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#26

Post by HelloNurse »

72deluxe wrote: post #17
ale42 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true... some people seem to appreciate the their "aesthetics", but many 2022 UIs are just much worse than what we used to have with... Windows 3.1, or System 7 on Mac. They had uniform keyboard shortcuts (at least Windows, no idea for Mac which I used only very rarely), uniform window controls, applications that didn't need a 150 MB runtime... the worse, is that this is still possible today, just many people don't…

I think there's an entire generation that think that UIs should be bloated and slow and have taken web apps to be the norm. It's very sad.

Time for a new cycle of replacement, we are already seeing storage of data on the computer rather than on someone's server as a feature.

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#27

Post by konkordat »

72deluxe wrote: post #5

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…

It's LGPL license. I wouldn't touch it with a stick when thinking about a real app.

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#28

Post by wrigby »

konkordat wrote: post #27
72deluxe wrote: post #5

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…

It's LGPL license. I wouldn't touch it with a stick when thinking about a real app.

I’m truly curious, is this because it rules out distributing a statically linked binary? I may be misremembering, but I thought LGPL is completely fine for commercial apps if you’re just looking against the LGPL’d code.

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#29

Post by pritambarhate »

konkordat wrote: post #27
72deluxe wrote: post #5

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…

It's LGPL license. I wouldn't touch it with a stick when thinking about a real app.

From their ReadMe

>> wxWidgets licence is a modified version of LGPL explicitly allowing not distributing the sources of an application using the library even in the case of static linking.

[1] https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#30

Post by heavyset_go »

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...

WxWidgets still works well today, I've used it on desktop products with great success.
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