4 ms·

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 b

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!
- GuB-42 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 I suppose that's one of the reasons why Electron is so popular these days. If MacOS is constantly changing its APIs, that Microsoft can't seem to decide between classic Win32 and Modern UI, Linux that is split between Qt and GTK, plus all the mess on the mobile side. Because OSes can't provide a consistent API, app ship with their their own OS! (a browser today is essentially an OS on top of an OS).
  - BruceEel 5y ago
    > Because OSes can't provide a consistent API, app ship with their their own OS! (a browser today is essentially an OS on top of an OS). This. Even when targeting a single platform the developer may very well choose to use one of these frameworks just to avoid having to deal with the most horrible parts of the platform in question (and GUI's tend to be those parts.)
jcelerier 5y ago
> It's controlled by a company that is in really bad shape financially I mean, we can bitch as much as we want on what TQTC is doing with the open-source license mess, but their stock went from 8$ in 2018 to 100$ ... http://www.nasdaqomxnordic.com/aktier/microsite?Instrument=HEX121457 http://www.nasdaqomxnordic.com/aktier/microsite?Instrument=H... They acquired froglogic a couple days ago: https://sdtimes.com/softwaredev/sd-times-news-digest-qt-acquires-froglogic-the-embedded-software-testing-compliance-summit-and-catchpoints-virtual-sre-community-event/ https://sdtimes.com/softwaredev/sd-times-news-digest-qt-acqu...
- Kliment 5y ago
  Oh wow what happened? Their 2019 numbers were terrible.
bsenftner 5y ago
I've been a wxWidgets dev for about 8 years now, and about a year ago I tried moving to ImGUI. The problem with ImGUI is it's necessity to constantly re-render, like a game engine. If one's application is already high-compute, using ImGUI is death to performance.

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!

GuB-42 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 I suppose that's one of the reasons why Electron is so popular these days. If MacOS is constantly changing its APIs, that Microsoft can't seem to decide between classic Win32 and Modern UI, Linux that is split between Qt and GTK, plus all the mess on the mobile side. Because OSes can't provide a consistent API, app ship with their their own OS! (a browser today is essentially an OS on top of an OS).
- BruceEel 5y ago
  > Because OSes can't provide a consistent API, app ship with their their own OS! (a browser today is essentially an OS on top of an OS). This. Even when targeting a single platform the developer may very well choose to use one of these frameworks just to avoid having to deal with the most horrible parts of the platform in question (and GUI's tend to be those parts.)

jcelerier 5y ago

> It's controlled by a company that is in really bad shape financially I mean, we can bitch as much as we want on what TQTC is doing with the open-source license mess, but their stock went from 8$ in 2018 to 100$ ... http://www.nasdaqomxnordic.com/aktier/microsite?Instrument=HEX121457 http://www.nasdaqomxnordic.com/aktier/microsite?Instrument=H... They acquired froglogic a couple days ago: https://sdtimes.com/softwaredev/sd-times-news-digest-qt-acquires-froglogic-the-embedded-software-testing-compliance-summit-and-catchpoints-virtual-sre-community-event/ https://sdtimes.com/softwaredev/sd-times-news-digest-qt-acqu...

Kliment 5y ago
Oh wow what happened? Their 2019 numbers were terrible.

bsenftner 5y ago

I've been a wxWidgets dev for about 8 years now, and about a year ago I tried moving to ImGUI. The problem with ImGUI is it's necessity to constantly re-render, like a game engine. If one's application is already high-compute, using ImGUI is death to performance.