Re: [gtkmm] Is Gtkmm stable and mature on Win32?

[Robert <morelli cs utah edu>]

On Wed, 2004-09-15 at 14:29, Ney Andr�e Mello Zunino wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> I am new to cross-platform GUI toolkits. However, there is a new project 
> at work which will give me the opportunity to learn one. I need to make 
> a design choice among gtkmm, Qt and WxWidgets. I have taken a 

With all due respect to the gtkmm community,  let me point out that the
name of the game in cross-platform gui development is Java.  Java's 
gui classes are extremely powerful and complete and identical behavior 
across platforms is usually very successful.  With any of the libraries 
you mention,  you're probably going to have more limited functionality 
and many potential hassles with straddling the Linux and Windows 
worlds.  For instance,  Java will give you printing support with preview
and printer selection dialogs,  etc.  I think you get native print 
selection dialogs with WxWidgets but I don't think gtkmm has even that. 
In addition,  Java gives you an incredibly rich set of general API's.
Etc.

This is not to say that gtkmm or one of the other C++ solutions are 
never the right choice.  Just be sure you have a compelling reason to
use technologies that will probably be more difficult and less powerful.

> superficial look at each of them and, as a C++ programmer, I must say I 
> have felt inclined toward gtkmm. I was pleased to see a design where 
> language features are exploited instead of relying on ugly and 
> old-fashioned hacks.
>
> All in all, I was very close to having a final decision and driving my 
> learning efforts toward gtkmm. There is only one issue which I need to 
> clear up before doing so: I read on some forum posts and articles 
> reviewing GUI toolkits, that one of gtkmm's weak points was that it was 
> faulty or unstable under Win32. Since the percentage of Win32 users in 
> the target public of the application in question is relatively high 
> (about 75%), that issue deserves special attention. So, I seek some 
> facts and advice in order for me to be able to make a good design decision.

I've done a very little bit of cross platform work using gtkmm.  In my
experience,  gtkmm works well enough under Windows.  Check the dates on 
the discussions you read,  as they might be outdated.

One issue that I did run into (and which I guess is probably typical
of the sort of problems you might see) is that some of the graphics 
primitives worked differently on Windows and Linux.  For instance,  the 
draw_arc method seemed to produce arcs with different bounding boxes on 
the two platforms.  I couldn't tell for sure which platform had a 
correct implementation because I couldn't find documentation that 
precisely stated what the draw_arc method was supposed to do on the 
level of pixels.  This is another point in favor of Java,  where all 
such things are extremely thoroughly documented.  By contrast,  the 
documentation for gtk and gtkmm is incomplete and in some places screwy.

There's also some confusing issues surrounding the multiple ways you can
do development under Windows (various Cygwin options,  MinGW, VC++,  
etc.)  And there are other issues I've run into with compiler 
differences and differences in libraries other than gtkmm.

> Thank you very much,