Member Avatar for PatMcC

Hi Everyone

I have been programming on Linux for about 8 years part time.

I have learned many languages and I am not afraid of using them. However I have learned to fear build systems, operating systems and IDEs.

I have been going around in circles for years with Gui WIdget toolkits. I have tried lots of them, FLTK, GTK, WxWidgets, QT etc, they are all fine for Linux but just don't feel right to me for Windows. I am concerned I will have cross platform issues, the binaries will be large and there will be a non native look and feel in some cases.

I think I would rather just program with "what's there" rather then using a cross platform toolkit.

My application has a clear seem between backend and frontend. I am thinking about doing the frontend in GTK on Linux and MFC on Windows.

Is it crazy to program in MFC these days? I don't want to use Visual Studio, could I pull this off with just vim and mingw?

Can anyone help me to get started with Windows Gui programming without .net, VS and such?

Thanks in advance-Patrick

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Member Avatar for rubberman

Both Wx and Qt are very viable GUI tool sets for Windows systems. If you want cross-platform operations / code, then you cannot use native Windows API's without some similar toolkit. They mask the underlying system API's so you can use the same code on all supported systems. I use Qt very successfully on a number of differnt operating systems as a result. I used to use WxWin, but I think Qt is more complete for GUI application development.

So, all that aside, what is it about these tools that makes you uncomfortable in the Windows environment?

Member Avatar for PatMcC

Hi rubberman

Thanks for answering my post :)

I want to choose my words carefully here because I know there are people writing great code in QT, I don't want to bash it at all.

I am very happy when I am typing "autonomous code", I mean code that is not concerned with linking to the code of others.

Almost everything I want to do though, should be done as a GUI App but I am always trying to find other ways. GUI programming just seems to inherently have a lot of libraries and platform specific issues. Projects like QT make things so much easier but they themselves become enormous in doing so.

After bad experiences with "big code" and libraries all over the place in different linux distros, I guess I have developed a phobia and I just want to stick to small code, native as possible. I figure that the less I have to bring over from Linux the better, only .net looks like the hugest pig of all and I don't want to go anywhere near it.

I was hoping to find some way to write a GUI on Windows while staying small and avoiding large codebases as much as possible.

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