Re: State of GTK+ on Windows (Was: gtk 2 or 3)

[Neil Bird <neil fnxweb com>]

Around about 28/10/10 12:48, John Emmas typed ...
> If I'm honest Neil, GTK2 does take a lot of getting used to if
> you've come from an MFC background - but once you've gotten your head
> around GTK, it really works very well indeed.

   I guess it would;  I've used GTK far more, on and off since GTK-1, and I 
try not to touch our MFC-based GUI stuff unless I can help it :)

  For the most part, we've been getting rid of the MFC components in favour 
of the raw Windows API, but it still pollutes the codebase (and has some 
quite nasty restrictions).


> Having said that, my
> apps don't tend to use 3D graphics or anything particularly fancy.

  We're starting to look at OpenGL for more fancy gfx;  I wouldn't 
anticipate many problems doing the same via the GTK GL widget(s), but I've 
not tried.

> If you prefer C++ (like me) there's a handy wrapper for GTK+, called gtkmm.
> It's part of the Gnome project and works perfectly well.

  Yes, we considered that, but it falls a little foul of the same issues we 
have wit Qt:  we already have a C++ class hierarchy that we like, and we'd 
only be shoehorning one more layer in between us and GTK.

  I've not completely dismissed the idea, though.


> So where will you have problems...?  As an MFC developer, am I right in
> thinking you'll be using Visual Studio as your build environment?

  Ew, don't call me an MFC developer :-)  Yes, we do do a lot of dev. under 
VS, and that's what I test-ran with (for Windows).  I used the pre-built GTK 
(etc.) DLLs;  I have no great desire to build my own (although I might, 
purely for debugging purposes).

  In Linux, it's GNU make and vim all the way.


> For me, Microsoft's debugger is unsurpassed and I've persevered with
> VC++  for that reason alone.

  This is why, still, I wouldn't push really hard at work for a Linux-only 
dev. environment, despite the majority of our code targeting Linux.  For all 
I don't like MS, nothing I've seen really comes close to VS in debug mode. 
Eclipse CDT is getting there, but it still several step behind.


> So the choice is yours - ease of compilation or ease of debugging.

  Debugging, every time!


  Sorry, this seems to have strayed way OT :)

--
[neil fnx ~]# rm -f .signature
[neil fnx ~]# ls -l .signature
ls: .signature: No such file or directory
[neil fnx ~]# exit