On Tue, 2003-08-12 at 13:31, Charlie Root wrote: > Hello world, > > > We're deciding on GUI APIs for two projects we plan to start with > requirements that only GTK+, QT and wxWindows seem to fulfill. The > preference is definitely for GTK+ but there are a few issues. > > GTK+ has not seemed to have been around for the win32 platform for > long. The application will be used more on win32 than Linux although > it will be used on Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris. One of the projects > will also be ported to embedded devices most likely PDAs that run > Linux, and that is where QT seems to have a good market. Although cost > is not an issue for us for QT, at least I enjoy glib's interface more. GTK for win32 is now only slightly behind GTK/X11 in terms of stability and functionality. It's really getting quite good. The glib wrapper functions really make differences in platforms quite neglible, eliminating most of my #ifdefs. Things like process control and file handling, for example, are quite well done. I understand that QT has much more to offer in the way of a framework, but I think it's often too much. GTK strikes a good balance. (Does anyone know how to ask GTK+ for the operating system directory separatoer character?) > > So I guess the question is are there large applications that can run > on win32 demonstrating the strengths of GTK+? On the flip side are > there large GTK+ apps that do not run on win32 revealing its > weaknesses? GIMP is a good example, except that the new GImp 1.3 does not yet compile under GTK/Win32 2.2.2. I think there are some idiosyncracies with the gimp code, though, that aren't related to gtk directly. I've found that when you program with win32/unix portability in mind right from the start, things are smooth with gtk. One of the most glaring problems with gtk/win32 in the past was the lack of integration into the Windows look and feel. This has largely been fixed with a native theme that uses native drawing calls (not quite sure what this means) on windows (see http://gtk-wimp.sourceforge.net). An example of a larger program that uses this is gaim for win32 (http://gaim.sourceforge.net) which looks really good under windows. As for DLL hell that we had with GTK before, well, those days are pretty much gone. Just use the GTK runtime from the gtk-win people: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gtk-win . You can either compile the libraries themselves to develop with (it is doable these days) or download the development package from the same url that the runtime comes from. Using this common runtime eliminates DLL hell and generally makes things smoother. The development package can install on top of the mingw/msys environment (http://www.mingw.org) or Visual Studio. Personally, I've built a complete mingw32 cross-compiler environment on my linux box that I use to compile my gtk apps for win32 and linux simultaneously (and sometimes test my win version in wine! but mostly vmware). I have a few easy modifications that can be made to configure.in that Glade-2 produced so that the -mms-bitfields and -mwindows flags are used (which autoconf turns into configure) when you target mingw32: mkdir win32 cd win32 ../configure --target=i386-mingw32 --host=i386-mingw32 make and simultaneously in another tree: mkdir linux cd linux ../configure make When I deploy my exe, I just use the gtk-runtime package mentioned above. Either start the exe from the C:\Program Files\Common Files\GTK\2.0\lib dir, or put that and bin in the global path. Install the wimp theme on top of that (it should be default in the runtime, in my opinion) and you're good to go. If anyone's interested, I also have dlls and development files for GTK-- (the c++ bindings) for the mingw32 evironment (native or cross). I would like to produce static libraries (because of Visual Studio vs G++ name mangling would mean the dlls only work with mingw32), but I can't seem to convince the default packages to do this. So yes, the tools are there, and I think it's mature enough. If anyone wants the cross environment (it's based on mingw32 gcc 3.2), let me know and i can make a large tarball of all or part of it (debian has mingw cross compilers in their apt somewhere). On a related, but non-gtk note, I have yet to get a cygwin cross environment working (you know, one where the binaries depend on cygwin1.dll). GCC always comes out being a mingw32 gcc. If anyone knows how to get gcc to use the cygwin dll, please let me know. Michael > > > _______________________________________________ > > gtk-list@xxxxxxxxx > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-list -- Michael Torrie <torriem@xxxxxxxxxxxx> _______________________________________________ gtk-list@xxxxxxxxx http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-list
