Subj : Re: wxWidgets
To   : comp.programming
From : Jon Harrop
Date : Mon Jul 04 2005 08:57 pm

Jyrki Alakuijala wrote:
> Jon Harrop wrote:
>> They all suck for graphics. Look at OpenGL, glut and SDL for
>> platform-independent stuff.
> 
> In my opinion, GLUT is really terrible for GUI programming, and
> only usable for making the most simple prototypes.

I've heard a lot of people say that. I use glut all the time and do a lot of
GUI work with it (admittedly via a big in-house library) and find it to be
more than adequate. Why do you think it isn't suitable?

> The only 
> almost acceptable widget set that is widely available, free,
> and almost good, is wxWidgets.

I tried wxWidgets and it just kept crashing on its own GUI code so I gave up
with it. The code was rather ugly IIRC.

> (Qt is not that free,

Why do you say Qt is not free? It is certainly free under Linux and I
thought they recently made it free under Windows too. I don't think Qt is
particularly amazing but I'd say it was much better designed than
wxWidgets.

> and gtk does not work that well in Windows.)

or Linux. ;-)

> Again, the travel 
> path of an wxImage to the screen is utterly complex and slow,
> but an OpenGL extension is available for it, too.

You're better off going straight to OpenGL, IMHO. It is vastly easier to
program, much more robust and also more cross-platform than any of those
widget toolkits. It is also trivial to add more complicated functionality
whenever you want it. Oh, and it's probably 100x faster on most
computers...

> I do not know how well wxWidgets integrates with Ocaml, though.

Most of the widget toolkits don't integrate very well with OCaml. IMHO, this
is simply because they are poorly designed (coming from lax languages). GTK
is probably the best example here. It's just hideous.

In contrast, our vector graphics library (Smoke) makes writing GUIs entirely
within OpenGL a breeze. They're much faster and more flexible and never
crash (unless you're using ATi's stuff ;-).

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
http://www.ffconsultancy.com

.