Re: GTK vs FLTK?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Tue, 2004-06-29 at 10:21, Juhana Sadeharju wrote:
> The CinePaint project still wants to move from GTK to FLTK.
> Anyone care quickly to compare GTK and FLTK?

Probably off-topic for this list. Maybe gtk-list instead. Setting
Reply-To.

The short answer is there's a tradeoff.

Toolkits with what's considered minimum modern features for normal
desktop apps (internationalization, accessibility, a long list of UI
behavior details and features, active tracking of desktop standards,
etc.) include Swing, Qt, GTK+, the Microsoft Windows-specific toolkits,
toolkits that wrap one of the aforementioned, and not a lot of others.

FLTK skips a lot of this and that makes it a lot smaller. The "modern"
toolkits are much larger because they do a lot more.
While I'm sure FLTK has some advantages, some things it lacks are "must
haves" for mainstream desktop apps, and the FLTK advantages aren't "must
have"

However, I doubt the CinePaint developers care about this, in my
experience the movie production world uses a lot of apps based on custom
one-off toolkits and generally speaking they are used to quirky user
interfaces and don't care about things like i18n and a11y. So FLTK may
well be right for them. You can't say one or another toolkit is right in
an absolute sense, it depends on what tradeoffs you want to make.

Havoc