Re: platform support

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>]

On Sat, 15 Jul 2006, ahmet alper parker wrote:

> Dear all, I am planning to develop a c/c++ application and I 
> am searching for a good gui designer and found gtk+ and glade. 
> I have a simple question. If I develop a gui with glade will 
> it be platform independent? (or how I can achieve this?) Do I 
> need gtk+ to be supported at all platforms (in ex. linux/unix 
> mac windows etc...)

GTK is an excellent toolkit, and it offers very decent 
cross-platform operability.  But there are a few things to watch 
out for.  First of all, yes, you need a gtk+ runtime on all 
platforms.  Glade is basically a design tool, not a substitute 
for the gtk libraries.

Then there's an issue with gtk versions.  The latest and 
greatest works fine on GNU/Linux and (I think) Windows XP and 
related OSs.  It doesn't work on win98 -- for that you have to 
back up to an earlier version.  And GTK on Mac OS X is a bit 
fiddly.  There's a "native" OS X verson of gtk, but it's not 
stable yet.  The alternative is running the X11 version on OS X, 
which is quite doable but requires quite a lot of setup.

--
Allin Cottrell
Department of Economics
Wake Forest University, NC