Re: [gtkmm] gtkmm vs wxGTK

[Matthew Walton <matthew alledora co uk>]

michael sherman og ge com wrote:
> I have a question.
> Why would one use gtkmm and not wxGTK?
>
> Mike

Well that's entirely a matter of personal preference and project 
requirements really. wxWidgets has the advantage of being cross-platform 
- you can use pretty much the same API on Windows, UNIX, Mac OS X, OS/2 
and so forth and get the native GUI look and feel as a result. This is 
great, but it's also a disadvantage - I've never seen a cross-platform 
GUI system which can take advantage of everything the platform in 
question has to offer, because it has to target some common base. This 
is especially true of Mac OS X, but that's likely not a concern if 
you're pondering gtkmm and wxGTK.

I'll admit I'm not very familiar with wxGTK's API (I've only really used 
wxWidgets through the wxHaskell bindings), but I'll throw in some things 
which I really, really like about gtkmm:

- uses C++-style APIs just about everywhere, right down to the string class
- no preprocessor tricks or custom language extensions; everything's in 
pure C++
- makes it dead easy to subclass GTK+ objects in C++
- everything you can do in GTK+ you can do in gtkmm (or at least, I've 
not yet seen anything you can't do that wasn't a real edge case)
- considerably more concise than GTK+ code in the native C API
- a happy, noncompulsory memory management system via containership, 
Gtk::manage and conventional new/delete operations

But I suspect if you really need to go cross-platform and you're not 
just talking about platforms where X11 is an acceptable display target, 
wxWidgets wins in a big way. But I've just looked at the tutorial slides 
from FOSDEM 2003 and it just seems... ugly. Anything written all in 
capitals like the event table stuff really makes me worry. Looks like 
Windows programming. Ewwww. gtkmm in general is conceptually clean, and 
that is a big bonus in my experience.