IUP – Cross platform C GUI library • Hacker News Board

Re: IUP – Cross platform C GUI library

#21

Post by gen2brain » Thu, May 25, 2023, 9:22 AM UTC

IUP is very nice and easy to use, and it uses real native controls, which is a big plus. Compared to wxWidgets, being written in C, it is easy to create bindings. I maintain Go bindings for IUP core here https://github.com/gen2brain/iup-go.

I wish development is faster though, perhaps moving the project to GitHub could help with that. I would like to see modern tray support on Linux instead of legacy one, someone to finish Cocoa support, native table/list view control (it is on the TODO list), support for gtk+ 4, etc.

Re: IUP – Cross platform C GUI library

#22

Post by marcodiego » Thu, May 25, 2023, 11:37 AM UTC

One of my advisors studied at puc-rio. Until early 2000's they had contacts with Petrobras (giant Brazilian oil and gas company) and SGI. We had some beautiful, exotic and powerful Silicon Graphics workstations in our labs: O2's, Fuel, 230... And people developed some impressive UI's like the ones available in the tecgraf section of https://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/en/screenshots.html .

Also there was some pressure for us to use IUP. We always had a "not as maintained as gtk or qt" feel and as much as we could, we refused it. I think nobody regrets that.

Re: IUP – Cross platform C GUI library

#23

Post by VZ » Thu, May 25, 2023, 11:46 AM UTC

rhdunn wrote: post #20

tored wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One big plus for IUP over wxWidgets is that API of IUP is very clean & easy to use compared to the complex C++ API of wxWidgets.

wxWidgets feels heavily inspired by Microsoft's MFC framework. That always felt clunky to me, compared to GUI toolkits like Qt and GTK.

This was indeed the case. In 1995. Since then just about everything has changed, but the idea that wxWidgets is MFC-like still refuses to die... Another common related opinion is that you have to use macros when using wxWidgets, which couldn't be further from truth since ~15 years (see https://wxwidgets.org/blog/2023/05/are-macros-required-to-us...) but, again, old impressions linger.

Re: IUP – Cross platform C GUI library

#24

Post by PennRobotics » Thu, May 25, 2023, 11:53 AM UTC

love2read wrote: post #2

Any pictures of what the windows will look like?

Basically the same as a standard Windows app. I only have Win 10 on my work PC, but if I compile the examples PLUS a manifest (or the #pragma to do this) it is comparable to the Microsoft apps:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PennRobotics/permalink/mai...

Since the same UUID in the manifest applies to Windows 11 and Windows 10, I'm willing to bet this would look a lot like the Windows 11 version of notepad.exe when compiled on a Windows 11 machine.

Re: IUP – Cross platform C GUI library

#25

Post by gen2brain » Thu, May 25, 2023, 11:57 AM UTC

love2read wrote: post #2

Any pictures of what the windows will look like?

You can check the screenshot from Windows 10 here https://github.com/gen2brain/iup-go/blob/main/examples/sampl.... If you are not using the manifest it will not follow the system appearance and will always look like Windows XP Classic.

Re: IUP – Cross platform C GUI library

#26

Post by syockit » Thu, May 25, 2023, 12:05 PM UTC

speed_spread wrote: post #7

Reticularas wrote: post #4

It appears to be a requirement that all C/C++ UI libraries have old, crusty looking visuals.

It's about time we rediscovered 3D UI like SGI IRIX had 30 years ago and remix it with what we've learned in information presentation since. WebGPU? I want my cyberspace and I want it now! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)

It's A UNIX System!

Re: IUP – Cross platform C GUI library

#27

Post by diego_moita » Thu, May 25, 2023, 12:45 PM UTC

It still has no support for OS-X.

I can understand the reason.

This library is made by Brazilian researchers working for an institute (very poorly) funded by the government. However, Apple machines are very, very expensive in Brazil and many other 3rd World countries, almost a luxury. Probably they're not affordable enough to many of those researchers.

However, not having a OS-X version is really a big obstacle for this library to be accepted.

Re: IUP – Cross platform C GUI library

#28

Post by mzs » Thu, May 25, 2023, 12:58 PM UTC

Neat a canvas lib that has support for fonts, clipboard, and printing:

  https://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/cd/

example:

  https://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/cd/

Re: IUP – Cross platform C GUI library

#29

Post by diego_moita » Thu, May 25, 2023, 12:58 PM UTC

laserbeam wrote: post #14

I get it, this might be cool. But, it's a UI library! And there's no screenshot on the main page or the overview tab. Guys, come on. Screenshots should be the first thing we see.

> And there's no screenshot on the main page or the overview tab

On the overview page there is a link called "Screenshots" and I clicked on it and it does really show screenshots.

Re: IUP – Cross platform C GUI library

#30

Post by kaba0 » Thu, May 25, 2023, 1:00 PM UTC

unwind wrote: post #16

This seems to be like the classic wxWidgets [1], i.e. it's an API that wraps the underlying platform's default toolkit. So on Windows it uses Windows' native controls, in Linux it seems to use GTK, and so on. That means that the advantage is being able to write against one API, and get cross-platform compatibility, which can be nice. It also means (typically) being limited in what you can do to the least common denom…

What’s people’s opinion on Eclipse’s SWT? It is probably the most commonly used API that just wraps native controls.