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WxWidgets 3.2

wxwidgets.org

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Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#61

Post by api »

phkahler wrote: post #44
api wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be good enough on platforms like iOS to dynamically link, include the DLLs in the bundle, and tell people they are on their own if they want to switch them out? You theoretically can.

>> Would it be good enough on platforms like iOS to dynamically link, include the DLLs in the bundle, and tell people they are on their own if they want to switch them out? You also have to offer them source code, or just ship it along with.

Doesn't the LGPL exempt linking from the "viral" nature of the GPL?

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#62

Post by mamcx »

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…

I' redoing all the UI on my eCommerce app to be "server driven" across iOS, Android, Web.

I get near parity on design on all platforms yet keep full native speed on mobile.

The main issue with old widget system is how hard is to theme them, and theming is, I think, a major driver of the use of HTML/CSS (certainly on my business customers, where they demand the UI be colorized with their corporate stuff!).

Fix that (like with SwiftUI) and suddenly using native is more doable (bussines-wise).

Combining with server-driven architecture, so far my eCommerce app with 3 dozens of screens is made with 2 files of SwiftUI (app specific, plus a one-time cost in build the boilerplate), very doable to a solo guy to code all in 3 platforms.

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#63

Post by lpcvoid »

bsenftner wrote: post #11
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 was an active user until 2 years ago, when I quit my last enterprise software job. They had a cross platform (including embedded systems) enterprise video security system, a suite of applications all written in wxWidgets. They screamed, they were so fast. They had to be, for our enterprise clients. But those same clients had typical "give me candy" managers, and they complained about the ancient native interface. T…

This is why it's so important to have managers which aren't stupid and have technical insight. Luxurious proposition, unfortunately.

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#64

Post by lpcvoid »

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.

And the best part: not a gram of Javascript or web tech!

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#65

Post by lpcvoid »

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…

And here I am, loving (modern!) C++ and not getting warm with Rust all that much.

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#66

Post by fayten »

mwcampbell wrote: post #42
gen2brain wrote: post #20

wxWidgets are a perfect choice if you want cross-platform native controls. Just a reminder, Qt doesn't use native controls, it just emulates the native look and feel. Besides wxWidgets I know only IUP that uses system native controls (though Cocoa is a work in progress), and IUP deals with just UI, wx is like a Qt, a lot more.

Eclipse's SWT for Java also uses native controls, and IIRC it does so more consistently across platforms than wx. In 2015 I wanted to develop a desktop app in Python, but use SWT, so I did a hacky mongrel setup where I used the pyjnius Python package to load the Avian lightweight JVM into my CPython process so I could use SWT. Avian is dead now, so if I ever have to port that app to ARM64 for Apple Silicon Macs (righ…

I'm working on a native wrapper for SWT with GraalVM. The resulting library with base SWT is about 18M, which is fairly large, but definitely workable.

I have successfully used the wrapper from C and Zig as a proof of concept. The main goal was to originally expose SWT for Nim, but I got pretty side tracked. I'll probably make a show HN later this year when I have it in a usable state. I haven't gotten callbacks working quite yet, which makes it pretty useless.

I'm a bit worried about performance, but I'll throw a cassowary constraint manager on top of a ton of widgets and see how it does. Memory usage with an empty window is ~35mb at 1920x1080. It successfully works on Windows, Linux, and MacOS x86 and aarch64.

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#67

Post by barnabee »

mamcx wrote: post #62
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…

I' redoing all the UI on my eCommerce app to be "server driven" across iOS, Android, Web. I get near parity on design on all platforms yet keep full native speed on mobile. The main issue with old widget system is how hard is to theme them, and theming is, I think, a major driver of the use of HTML/CSS (certainly on my business customers, where they demand the UI be colorized with their corporate stuff!). Fix that (l…

I wish theming would go back to being something we as end users do to our whole system, not something forced upon us by app developers (or their corporate overlords).

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#68

Post by paulclinger »

smasher164 wrote: post #51
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…

wxPython is the only maintained alternative there. I think there’s an opportunity to create bindings to other languages with libClang nowadays. However, it’s gotta be done selectively, since there’s so much surface area in the API to fill in the gaps for C++’s standard library.

I also maintain wxlua (Lua wrapper around wxwidgets: https://github.com/pkulchenko/wxlua) and it is expected to work with the current wxwidgets release (I tested with a recent pre-release version).

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#69

Post by benibela »

raphlinus wrote: post #41
72deluxe wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it just wraps the native controls...? You're effectively saying that native controls are not for 2022...

A serious question: what are native controls on Windows? Is the Windows XP era where each control is its own HWND (and usually drawn with GDI+)? Is it Windows 7 era where the drawing is Direct2D? Windows 8 where the elements of the app come together with DirectComposition? Or maybe Windows 10 style which is an evolution of UWP (now rebranded WinUI), with drawing in Win2D?

Another question: what are native controls on Linux? Qt on KDE? Gtk on Gnome? Gtk2, Gtk3, or Gtk4? Or make your own X11 widgets?

Re: WxWidgets 3.2

#70

Post by benibela »

mwcampbell wrote: post #42
gen2brain wrote: post #20

wxWidgets are a perfect choice if you want cross-platform native controls. Just a reminder, Qt doesn't use native controls, it just emulates the native look and feel. Besides wxWidgets I know only IUP that uses system native controls (though Cocoa is a work in progress), and IUP deals with just UI, wx is like a Qt, a lot more.

Eclipse's SWT for Java also uses native controls, and IIRC it does so more consistently across platforms than wx. In 2015 I wanted to develop a desktop app in Python, but use SWT, so I did a hacky mongrel setup where I used the pyjnius Python package to load the Avian lightweight JVM into my CPython process so I could use SWT. Avian is dead now, so if I ever have to port that app to ARM64 for Apple Silicon Macs (righ…

Once I started building a GUI wrapper that could either use SWT or AWT as backend (or perhaps Swing rather than AWT, i do not remember).

I do not remember why. Perhaps I thought it will be more portable or performant.

But I quickly abandoned that (would not want to get stuck on a legacy tech like java and awt) and ported all my projects to Pascal for maximal performance.

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