gtk+ for linux aswell as for windows

[Tor Lillqvist <tml iki fi>]

Johan Rydberg writes:
 > I'm thinking of developing a small application and will
 > probably use gtk+ as my gui toolkit.  what I wonder is,
 > how hard is it to port a gtk+/linux app to gtk+/windows?
 > is there any differences that one have think about?

Not hard at all. Not much difference. Except:

- On Unix you most probably use GTK+ 1.2.8. The GTK+ version available
  for Windows is currently a snapshot of 1.3.0 from March. Eventually,
  it will be 1.3.1 (or 2.0, if it takes so long to get it working
  again that GTK+ 2.0 is released during the time). There are (will
  be) a bunch of programmer-visible differences between GTK+ 1.2.x and
  GTK+ 2.0.

- If you use the currently available 1.3.0 -snapshot, you need to know
  that a few GTK+ widgets don't work very well on Windows, if at all:
  GtkLayout and GtkSocket. This is just because of lack of time, and
  becuase GIMP doesn't need them.

- GTK+ on Windows uses UTF-8. You must pass all strings to it in UTF-8
  format.

- If you use gdk_input_add() for sockets on Unix, on Windows you must
  use g_io_channel_win32_new_stream_socket() and g_io_add_watch()
  instead.

- The more esoteric GDK drawing modes (including stipples and tiles)
  are only very partially implemented.

Hmm. Can't think of anything else right now.

--tml