15 ms·

wxWidgets 3.1.5

119 points by tkuraku 5y ago

billforsternz 5y ago
I use wxWidgets for my chess GUI Tarrasch https://triplehappy.com https://triplehappy.com I am not sure if the glacial release schedule these days is a strength (it's stable, there's not much left to do), or a weakness (the project is dying). The various V3.1.x releases all say please use this release for production, even though in theory it's the even number releases that are supposed to be production worthy. Waiting for V3.2.0 (by some measure the right thing to do) would have meant waiting for many years at this point, not sure how many.
- BruceEel 5y ago
  Genuine, non-trolling question: why wxWidgets instead of, say QT or GTK? ((Looking into GUI toolkits for a side project, I was thinking about one of the SDL-based ones but really unsure now))
  - billforsternz 5y ago
    I made the decision around 2010, when the landscape was a little different. A key but rather random factor was I'd happened to buy a book on wx, just for interests sake. I liked that wx was straightforwardly open source, whereas qt had various licensing issues and complications (still does). Gtk is really in a different category. Wx sits on gtk on Linux for example.
    - BruceEel 5y ago
      Interesting, thank you.
  - evilelectron 5y ago
    wxWidgets is a wrapper over the native GUI toolkit. It allows you to write a OS independent GUI code and because it is a wrapper you get most of the benefits of native toolkit like dark mode.
    - formerly_proven 5y ago
      > most of the benefits of native toolkit like dark mode. On which OS does dark mode work with wx? Certainly not with Windows... (which, as VZ points out, isn't wx's fault, it's just that no APIs officially exist for this - explorer.exe has dark mode, but that uses completely private, undocumented APIs).
      - VZ 5y ago
        Maybe this has something to do with the fact that Windows doesn't have dark mode for the desktop applications in the first place.
  - Kliment 5y ago
    Not the person you're asking but here's my take anyway: I use wx for my own stuff and also use a lot of wx-based applications. Wx is quirky and has some bugs but it's not going to go away or have a massive breaking change without warning. Its biggest weakness is the slow release schedule which leaves users waiting for a long time to access things that are critical on changing platforms (macos is a massive pain to support as the underlying system changes all the damn time). My opinion of it can be summarized as "the worst, except for all the others" so I keep using it. I keep considering Qt whenever I start a new project and I'm still scared to use it. It's controlled by a company that is in really bad shape financially and has a history of attempting stupid things for short-term profit and screwing over customers. It's reasonable if you can manage with either just the LGPL components or if your entire project is GPL, but if not their license terms are really terrible and get worse and worse over time. They keep making changes that fuck over their paying customers. I don't feel good about using this at the moment. The KDE people have thankfully got that company by the balls with a watertight contract, and I totally trust the KDE people, but there's still plenty of damage the company can do, and every sign they will. It's really unfortunate because Qt is otherwise an excellent platform. Multiplatform gtk is a pain. There are a few projects that successfully pull it off (Horizon EDA is a notable example) but I don't think I could manage it myself. If you're doing a new thing you might want to consider one of the many imgui implementations (as you seem to be thinking in that direction already).
    - BruceEel 5y ago
      Ah indeed, I am one of those painful macOS users.. the carelessness with which the mother company changes and/or breaks API's overnight still boggles my mind. It's funny, I have some experience with Swing, from work, and I kind of like it, API-wise, so I toyed with the idea of JNI'ing my way around it... but it seems such a ridiculous thing to do for a super-simple GUI. Plus missing the chance of actually learning a 'native' (native as in code) GUI toolkit. I remember playing with Qt (many) years ago and making a mental note to get back to it but a 2020 revisit turned into an exercise in frustration, couldn't get it to build anything (very likely to blame on my ageing XCode installation rather than the Qt SDK). But as you point out, licensing issues & overall maker's attitude need to be considered too. The imgui's are quite neat. I like the fact that building one of the demo's (with an impressive array of widgets) sort of 'just worked.' That's impressive, these days!
  - ZuLuuuuuu 5y ago
    One key difference between wxWidgets and Qt or GTK is that wxWidgets, as far as I know, uses native controls to create the UI, unlike Qt or GTK which draw everything themselves. Qt is really good at imitating a native feeling but wxWidgets provides a real native UX. Having said that, for my Python projects, I am currently using Qt via PySide2 since that one worked without any problems with a simple pip installation while the other 2 gave some errors (I tried them about 2 years ago, maybe they work better now). Another reason I currently use Qt is because I needed to do a lot of drawing and interact with these drawings on a canvas and Qt has QGraphicsView widget which is a really capable canvas widget where you can easily do transformations, interactivity with good performance and it also has a good documentation. GTK didn't have such a widget out of the box, I didn't look at wxWidgets, though, maybe that one has.
    - Kelteseth 5y ago
      > wxWidgets, [...], uses native controls But only the old school Windows style right? I still don't get the argument because Windows itself now has like 3 different styles for their system apps themselves. There is not the "one" native style.
      - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
        This whole area has got so muddied with Microsoft going beserk after Windows 8, the shift to the web, mass use of Electron and Apple bringing iPhone/iPad apps to macos. It's quite sad really because none of it was changed in the name of users interest.
      - pjc50 5y ago
        Those are the true native style for Windows, yes. Microsoft's subsequent efforts aren't as good and they've not even fully committed to them themselves. WPF is on life support.
        72deluxe 5y ago
        WOF is on life-support?? What do they recommend now then? I know in C# land WinForms was discouraged (no idea why) but what do they recommend now?? What is the "native" toolkit for modern C++ apps on Windows? I end up using wxWidgets because it is easy.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    I did a couple of commercial programs with it back when Qt was charging for a licence. In the end I wish I had stumped up the money for Qt as I had a lot of problems with wx.
  - VZ 5y ago
    My answer at https://stackoverflow.com/a/19358996/15275 https://stackoverflow.com/a/19358996/15275 dates from 8 years ago but it's still relevant.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - billfruit 5y ago
    Also why not JavaFX? Perhaps even Lazarus as well. Xamarin could be a viable choice as well.
- ilaksh 5y ago
  I used wxWidgets for my Chess Timer. https://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Miscellaneous/Chess-Timer-Livesay.shtml https://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Miscellaneous/Chess-Tim... It was many, many years ago, wayy before 2015. Not sure when. Don't have the source code. Now there appears to be a "cracked" version on some Russian site..which is strange because I don't remember putting any kind of copy protection. So either I totally forgot about the copy protection or someone is using my program for malware or something.
- laumars 5y ago
  > The various V3.1.x releases all say please use this release for production, even though in theory it's the even number releases that are supposed to be production worthy. V3.1.x is 5 years old now and it looks like they’re using semver for at least v3 releases. So I wouldn’t worry about this being an odd numbered release. https://semver.org/ https://semver.org/
- VZ 5y ago
  It's neither a strength (there are definitely tons of things to do) but nor is it much of a weakness because the development is quite active pretty much all the time (just look at the commit history, PR merge rate or whatever). The main problem with 3.2.0 is that, due to our commitment to ABI compatibility for even-numbered releases, we really want to cram as many new APIs into it as possible and this keeps pushing it further and further away. If nothing catastrophic happens, it should finally be released this autumn, whether we manage to finish all the planned features (see https://trac.wxwidgets.org/wiki/Roadmap https://trac.wxwidgets.org/wiki/Roadmap) or not, but in the meanwhile you really shouldn't hesitate to use 3.1.x, the only unstable part of it is the ABI (_not_ API). Nice chess GUI, BTW! (although I admit that I spend what little time I have for chess exclusively on Lichess nowadays).
  - billforsternz 5y ago
    Thank you for the incredible effort you have put into wxWidgets over many years. If you go to Help > Credits you will see you get a credit within the Tarrasch program. Yes, you are right, Lichess is fabulous. There are still some things I much prefer to do in Tarrasch though :-)
Klonoar 5y ago
I recently-ish upgraded an app's (Slippi) wxWidgets base to 3.1.4, which led me into a somewhat deep dive of wxWidgets since the Dolphin build it was forked from had an "Externals" version that was somewhat of a custom setup. Needless to say I have a renewed appreciation for the amount of work that went into (and still goes into) wxWidgets. It's just absurd how well it covers the "big 3" desktop environments. I think it probably gets a bad rep when compared to "modern" UI development frameworks, however this thing is still trucking along all these years later. I'm not sure I'll need to touch 3.1.5, but it's just really cool to see it still being worked on. I think the biggest thing the project needs though though is... documentation. Or maybe it has it, but needs some serious SEO work to make it better accessible? So much of my time was spent trying to figure out what specific feature flags meant, whether they were still valid, and so on. I've done Cocoa development for years, so I'm used to outdated/old documentation, but with wxWidgets it just felt... harder to find the right stuff. Maybe because the userbase is smaller in comparison?
- VZ 5y ago
  FWIW updating from 3.1.4 to 3.1.5 (and then to 3.2.0) should be pretty seamless. The documentation does need work, but it's hard to find people volunteering to do it (although a few people do contribute to the docs too and this is something that is always very much appreciated). Any concrete suggestions for improvements are welcome as reports on https://trac.wxwidgets.org/newticket https://trac.wxwidgets.org/newticket and, as you might have already realized by now, PRs to the docs on https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/pulls https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/pulls are even more so. Finally, asking questions (on the forum, users mailing list or SO) seems to work pretty well for most people.
  - Klonoar 5y ago
    Cool to know re: 3.1.5, but I don't think I'll need to dig into it as Dolphin upstream moved to Qt, and eventually, hopefully, Slippi just mirrors that. And yeah, I hear you on the people issue... open source is sometimes a thankless job. Overall though, great job on wxWidgets so far - I really do think it's an underappreciated project.
- 5y ago
rapsey 5y ago
If only they had usable C bindings so it could be used from more languages. Such a shame. Making it possible to use from Rust, Nim, Go would really give it a second wind of users.
- VZ 5y ago
  Be the change you want to be! wxC did exist but grew unmaintained, split into several variants (I think at least wxHaskell and wxErlang had their own versions) and withered. It shouldn't be that difficult to revive it but, well, somebody does need to do it. It's a bit funny that people don't realize that "they" are "you". wxWidgets is an old school open source project, people are supposed to contribute to it because they have their own itch to scratch. FWIW wx has always been very friendly to new contributors, so I'd really encourage people who are annoyed by something in it to just propose changing them on wx-dev.
laurent123456 5y ago
Last time I used wxWidgets, more than 10 years ago, the API felt very dated and clumsy compared to Qt for example. Do people still use wxWidgets for new deployment?
- eivarv 5y ago
  Yup. I use it for most cross-platform apps as a default. Quick prototyping with Python and wx would be my typical use-case.
  - julosflb 5y ago
    Idem. I developed quite a number of desktop apps in a professional environment using wxPython. I found easy to quickly prototype new ideas. Also, you have access to the rich python ecosystem that other solutions for producing desktop apps won't have. I found the API to be usable although the event system is bit limited in my opinion. I even chosen it to develop a commercial app in c++(https://seamuove.com https://seamuove.com) mainly because I knew the API. Bonus is that you can produce small single exe using static linking. Overall thanks for the effort dear wx team!
- emddudley 5y ago
  I currently maintain an app that uses wxPython and it still feels dated and clumsy. Everything is named poorly, the documentation has large gaps, and there are numerous pitfalls and gotchas. I am in the process of moving to PySide and will not be considering wxWidgets for any future projects.
tkuraku 5y ago
I think wxWidgets is fantastic. I use it in my CMake project. I have a git submodule with the wxWidgets source. I just set the options I want and add_subdirectory(). I statically link it it into my binary for easy distribution, because the license is more permissive than LGPL in that regard. Thanks to the wxWidgets collaborators for all their hard work!
stefantalpalaru 5y ago
Be aware that 3.1.5 enables EGL by default and, if your application uses GLX, you're going to have problems: https://github.com/cjcliffe/CubicSDR/issues/886 https://github.com/cjcliffe/CubicSDR/issues/886

119 points by tkuraku 5y ago

I use wxWidgets for my chess GUI Tarrasch https://triplehappy.com https://triplehappy.com I am not sure if the glacial release schedule these days is a strength (it's stable, there's not much left to do), or a weakness (the project is dying). The various V3.1.x releases all say please use this release for production, even though in theory it's the even number releases that are supposed to be production worthy. Waiting for V3.2.0 (by some measure the right thing to do) would have meant waiting for many years at this point, not sure how many.

BruceEel 5y ago
Genuine, non-trolling question: why wxWidgets instead of, say QT or GTK? ((Looking into GUI toolkits for a side project, I was thinking about one of the SDL-based ones but really unsure now))
- billforsternz 5y ago
  I made the decision around 2010, when the landscape was a little different. A key but rather random factor was I'd happened to buy a book on wx, just for interests sake. I liked that wx was straightforwardly open source, whereas qt had various licensing issues and complications (still does). Gtk is really in a different category. Wx sits on gtk on Linux for example.
  - BruceEel 5y ago
    Interesting, thank you.
- evilelectron 5y ago
  wxWidgets is a wrapper over the native GUI toolkit. It allows you to write a OS independent GUI code and because it is a wrapper you get most of the benefits of native toolkit like dark mode.
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    > most of the benefits of native toolkit like dark mode. On which OS does dark mode work with wx? Certainly not with Windows... (which, as VZ points out, isn't wx's fault, it's just that no APIs officially exist for this - explorer.exe has dark mode, but that uses completely private, undocumented APIs).
    - VZ 5y ago
      Maybe this has something to do with the fact that Windows doesn't have dark mode for the desktop applications in the first place.
- Kliment 5y ago
  Not the person you're asking but here's my take anyway: I use wx for my own stuff and also use a lot of wx-based applications. Wx is quirky and has some bugs but it's not going to go away or have a massive breaking change without warning. Its biggest weakness is the slow release schedule which leaves users waiting for a long time to access things that are critical on changing platforms (macos is a massive pain to support as the underlying system changes all the damn time). My opinion of it can be summarized as "the worst, except for all the others" so I keep using it. I keep considering Qt whenever I start a new project and I'm still scared to use it. It's controlled by a company that is in really bad shape financially and has a history of attempting stupid things for short-term profit and screwing over customers. It's reasonable if you can manage with either just the LGPL components or if your entire project is GPL, but if not their license terms are really terrible and get worse and worse over time. They keep making changes that fuck over their paying customers. I don't feel good about using this at the moment. The KDE people have thankfully got that company by the balls with a watertight contract, and I totally trust the KDE people, but there's still plenty of damage the company can do, and every sign they will. It's really unfortunate because Qt is otherwise an excellent platform. Multiplatform gtk is a pain. There are a few projects that successfully pull it off (Horizon EDA is a notable example) but I don't think I could manage it myself. If you're doing a new thing you might want to consider one of the many imgui implementations (as you seem to be thinking in that direction already).
  - BruceEel 5y ago
    Ah indeed, I am one of those painful macOS users.. the carelessness with which the mother company changes and/or breaks API's overnight still boggles my mind. It's funny, I have some experience with Swing, from work, and I kind of like it, API-wise, so I toyed with the idea of JNI'ing my way around it... but it seems such a ridiculous thing to do for a super-simple GUI. Plus missing the chance of actually learning a 'native' (native as in code) GUI toolkit. I remember playing with Qt (many) years ago and making a mental note to get back to it but a 2020 revisit turned into an exercise in frustration, couldn't get it to build anything (very likely to blame on my ageing XCode installation rather than the Qt SDK). But as you point out, licensing issues & overall maker's attitude need to be considered too. The imgui's are quite neat. I like the fact that building one of the demo's (with an impressive array of widgets) sort of 'just worked.' That's impressive, these days!
- ZuLuuuuuu 5y ago
  One key difference between wxWidgets and Qt or GTK is that wxWidgets, as far as I know, uses native controls to create the UI, unlike Qt or GTK which draw everything themselves. Qt is really good at imitating a native feeling but wxWidgets provides a real native UX. Having said that, for my Python projects, I am currently using Qt via PySide2 since that one worked without any problems with a simple pip installation while the other 2 gave some errors (I tried them about 2 years ago, maybe they work better now). Another reason I currently use Qt is because I needed to do a lot of drawing and interact with these drawings on a canvas and Qt has QGraphicsView widget which is a really capable canvas widget where you can easily do transformations, interactivity with good performance and it also has a good documentation. GTK didn't have such a widget out of the box, I didn't look at wxWidgets, though, maybe that one has.
  - Kelteseth 5y ago
    > wxWidgets, [...], uses native controls But only the old school Windows style right? I still don't get the argument because Windows itself now has like 3 different styles for their system apps themselves. There is not the "one" native style.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      This whole area has got so muddied with Microsoft going beserk after Windows 8, the shift to the web, mass use of Electron and Apple bringing iPhone/iPad apps to macos. It's quite sad really because none of it was changed in the name of users interest.
    - pjc50 5y ago
      Those are the true native style for Windows, yes. Microsoft's subsequent efforts aren't as good and they've not even fully committed to them themselves. WPF is on life support.
      - 72deluxe 5y ago
        WOF is on life-support?? What do they recommend now then? I know in C# land WinForms was discouraged (no idea why) but what do they recommend now?? What is the "native" toolkit for modern C++ apps on Windows? I end up using wxWidgets because it is easy.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  I did a couple of commercial programs with it back when Qt was charging for a licence. In the end I wish I had stumped up the money for Qt as I had a lot of problems with wx.
- VZ 5y ago
  My answer at https://stackoverflow.com/a/19358996/15275 https://stackoverflow.com/a/19358996/15275 dates from 8 years ago but it's still relevant.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- billfruit 5y ago
  Also why not JavaFX? Perhaps even Lazarus as well. Xamarin could be a viable choice as well.
ilaksh 5y ago
I used wxWidgets for my Chess Timer. https://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Miscellaneous/Chess-Timer-Livesay.shtml https://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Miscellaneous/Chess-Tim... It was many, many years ago, wayy before 2015. Not sure when. Don't have the source code. Now there appears to be a "cracked" version on some Russian site..which is strange because I don't remember putting any kind of copy protection. So either I totally forgot about the copy protection or someone is using my program for malware or something.
laumars 5y ago
> The various V3.1.x releases all say please use this release for production, even though in theory it's the even number releases that are supposed to be production worthy. V3.1.x is 5 years old now and it looks like they’re using semver for at least v3 releases. So I wouldn’t worry about this being an odd numbered release. https://semver.org/ https://semver.org/
VZ 5y ago
It's neither a strength (there are definitely tons of things to do) but nor is it much of a weakness because the development is quite active pretty much all the time (just look at the commit history, PR merge rate or whatever). The main problem with 3.2.0 is that, due to our commitment to ABI compatibility for even-numbered releases, we really want to cram as many new APIs into it as possible and this keeps pushing it further and further away. If nothing catastrophic happens, it should finally be released this autumn, whether we manage to finish all the planned features (see https://trac.wxwidgets.org/wiki/Roadmap https://trac.wxwidgets.org/wiki/Roadmap) or not, but in the meanwhile you really shouldn't hesitate to use 3.1.x, the only unstable part of it is the ABI (_not_ API). Nice chess GUI, BTW! (although I admit that I spend what little time I have for chess exclusively on Lichess nowadays).
- billforsternz 5y ago
  Thank you for the incredible effort you have put into wxWidgets over many years. If you go to Help > Credits you will see you get a credit within the Tarrasch program. Yes, you are right, Lichess is fabulous. There are still some things I much prefer to do in Tarrasch though :-)

Klonoar 5y ago

I recently-ish upgraded an app's (Slippi) wxWidgets base to 3.1.4, which led me into a somewhat deep dive of wxWidgets since the Dolphin build it was forked from had an "Externals" version that was somewhat of a custom setup. Needless to say I have a renewed appreciation for the amount of work that went into (and still goes into) wxWidgets. It's just absurd how well it covers the "big 3" desktop environments. I think it probably gets a bad rep when compared to "modern" UI development frameworks, however this thing is still trucking along all these years later. I'm not sure I'll need to touch 3.1.5, but it's just really cool to see it still being worked on. I think the biggest thing the project needs though though is... documentation. Or maybe it has it, but needs some serious SEO work to make it better accessible? So much of my time was spent trying to figure out what specific feature flags meant, whether they were still valid, and so on. I've done Cocoa development for years, so I'm used to outdated/old documentation, but with wxWidgets it just felt... harder to find the right stuff. Maybe because the userbase is smaller in comparison?

VZ 5y ago
FWIW updating from 3.1.4 to 3.1.5 (and then to 3.2.0) should be pretty seamless. The documentation does need work, but it's hard to find people volunteering to do it (although a few people do contribute to the docs too and this is something that is always very much appreciated). Any concrete suggestions for improvements are welcome as reports on https://trac.wxwidgets.org/newticket https://trac.wxwidgets.org/newticket and, as you might have already realized by now, PRs to the docs on https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/pulls https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/pulls are even more so. Finally, asking questions (on the forum, users mailing list or SO) seems to work pretty well for most people.
- Klonoar 5y ago
  Cool to know re: 3.1.5, but I don't think I'll need to dig into it as Dolphin upstream moved to Qt, and eventually, hopefully, Slippi just mirrors that. And yeah, I hear you on the people issue... open source is sometimes a thankless job. Overall though, great job on wxWidgets so far - I really do think it's an underappreciated project.
5y ago

rapsey 5y ago

If only they had usable C bindings so it could be used from more languages. Such a shame. Making it possible to use from Rust, Nim, Go would really give it a second wind of users.

VZ 5y ago
Be the change you want to be! wxC did exist but grew unmaintained, split into several variants (I think at least wxHaskell and wxErlang had their own versions) and withered. It shouldn't be that difficult to revive it but, well, somebody does need to do it. It's a bit funny that people don't realize that "they" are "you". wxWidgets is an old school open source project, people are supposed to contribute to it because they have their own itch to scratch. FWIW wx has always been very friendly to new contributors, so I'd really encourage people who are annoyed by something in it to just propose changing them on wx-dev.

laurent123456 5y ago

Last time I used wxWidgets, more than 10 years ago, the API felt very dated and clumsy compared to Qt for example. Do people still use wxWidgets for new deployment?

eivarv 5y ago
Yup. I use it for most cross-platform apps as a default. Quick prototyping with Python and wx would be my typical use-case.
- julosflb 5y ago
  Idem. I developed quite a number of desktop apps in a professional environment using wxPython. I found easy to quickly prototype new ideas. Also, you have access to the rich python ecosystem that other solutions for producing desktop apps won't have. I found the API to be usable although the event system is bit limited in my opinion. I even chosen it to develop a commercial app in c++(https://seamuove.com https://seamuove.com) mainly because I knew the API. Bonus is that you can produce small single exe using static linking. Overall thanks for the effort dear wx team!
emddudley 5y ago
I currently maintain an app that uses wxPython and it still feels dated and clumsy. Everything is named poorly, the documentation has large gaps, and there are numerous pitfalls and gotchas. I am in the process of moving to PySide and will not be considering wxWidgets for any future projects.

tkuraku 5y ago

I think wxWidgets is fantastic. I use it in my CMake project. I have a git submodule with the wxWidgets source. I just set the options I want and add_subdirectory(). I statically link it it into my binary for easy distribution, because the license is more permissive than LGPL in that regard. Thanks to the wxWidgets collaborators for all their hard work!

stefantalpalaru 5y ago

Be aware that 3.1.5 enables EGL by default and, if your application uses GLX, you're going to have problems: https://github.com/cjcliffe/CubicSDR/issues/886 https://github.com/cjcliffe/CubicSDR/issues/886