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

[zz excite it]

On Thursday 28 October 2010 13:48:17 John Emmas wrote:
> On 28 Oct 2010, at 11:52, Neil Bird wrote:
>
> >  So what are the curent issues with the Win32 GTK+ port?
> >
> >  We have a cross-platform C++ class framework that we've developed at work, but it still relies on 
> > Windows MFC for the main GUI aspects.  I've always anticipated that should we be able to move to a cross 
> > platform GUI as well as cross-platform core code (most of our systems are head-less Linux boxes), we'd 
> > want to plump for GTK+.
> >   
>
> I don't think Tor has any need to be beating himself up over gtk-win32.  I made exactly the same move about 
> a year ago and would never go back to MFC now.  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 daresay there are problems - just like any other technology - but for the kind of projects 
> I'm involved in, GTK2 handles them very nicely.  Having said that, my apps don't tend to use 3D graphics or 
> anything particularly fancy.  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.
>
> 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?  GTK+ and some (SOME) of it's dependencies already come with VS build 
> projects.  But don't expect this to be universal.  Many dependencies only supply binaries for Visual C++ 6. 
>  Unfortunately, VC++6 is hugely non-compliant and utterly useless for building modern projects.  You'll 
> need to use at least VC++8 - but mixing your VC++8 with the older VC++6 support libs is very much fraught 
> with problems.  If you want to continue using Visual Studio as your Windows IDE (which in many ways, I 
> would recommend) you must be prepared to obtain the source code for ALL your dependencies and to build the 
> whole lot with the same compiler.  I'm in the process of doing that now for a project called 'Ardour' which 
> is probably the biggest project I've ever been involved in.  Building everything with VC++8 is possible but 
> it's by no means easy.
>
> If you want an easier route you might like to consider MinGW or Cygwin as your Windows build environment.  
> You'll probably have an easier time with those compilers (esp. MinGW) but the downside is that you'll be 
> stuck with the utterly dismal GDB debugger  :-(   For me, Microsoft's debugger is unsurpassed and I've 
> persevered with VC++ for that reason alone.
>
> So the choice is yours - ease of compilation or ease of debugging.  Maybe Tor can expand on what exactly 
> are the deficiencies of gtk-win32.  But in general terms I don't think you've got much to be afraid of with 
> GTK2 (except a steep learning curve maybe, and a good deal of hard work!)
>
> John

Hi,
Take a look at http://www.codeblocks.org/. There you'll find a IDE that can be installed
both on linux and windows (and on windows comes with a bundled gcc compiler).
For me it worked very well and even allowed to port projetcs from linux to windows
with minimal effort. if you prefer a newer version of gcc  you can find one with
installer at http://tdm-gcc.tdragon.net/.

Hope this helps.
ZZ