6 ms·

Ask HN: An acceptable cross-platform GUI toolkit?

28 points by moder 18y ago

It's interesting but disappointing that there's no standout "winner" among desktop GUI toolkits. Among other things, devs want to write software that runs on their favorite GNU/Linux distribution, but that also runs nicely and is easily installed on MS Windows and Mac OS X. Here are the arguments I hear against some current popular toolkits: * GTK+ -- Has lots of moving parts. Difficult to build/install on MS Windows. Some say it's too closely tied to X11. Doesn't look enough like MS Windows on MS Windows. The LGPL licensing is very successful though, as demonstrated by the fairly large developer community and by its use in Gnome. * Qt -- Either GPL your software or pay the licensing fees. Also some don't like having to deal with C++ if you're required to ever look under the hood. Nice that it comes in one big piece though. * Tk -- Some have referred to Tk as a vistigial GUI appendage from a bygone era. Also it depends upon Tk. This one would be a hard sell to get everyone to agree on. * wxWidgets -- Complaints are that it looks too much like the MS Windows API, and also that it's too big (being a wrapper around lower-level GUI toolkits). It would seem that we (the free software community) should just bite the bullet, list out the basic requirements for a successful GUI toolkit, and go ahead and create it. I'd dare say that the requirements might look like this: * Written in C. C is fast, portable, and everyone knows it. Corollary: keep it simple (like Tk) and packaged in one piece (like Qt). Having a half dozen different pieces all bolted together (like GTK+) in the name of modularity only makes it harder to create easily-distributable cross-platform apps. 2nd corollary: be careful not to tie it too closely to X11. * Keep it simple so it's easy to port to Windows and Mac OS X (Cocoa). Corollary: simple and easy to build too. * LGPL licensed. Most camps can probably (at least grudgingly) come to agreement on this, and it's worked pretty well for GTK+. Works for free software and for commercial apps, and tends to build nice communities. * Can easily be made to look like MS Windows on MS Windows, and Aqua on Mac OS X. I really don't care if it's themable or not, but for wide adoption, it had at least better be able to easily make itself look like MS Windows and Aqua. * Easy to make bindings for Python, Ruby, Perl, etc. I really do not want to write GUI apps in C, but I don't want it so fancy that you have to do acrobatics to mate, say, Python, to it. * Simple and easy to use (like Tk). Anyone working on or know of that cross-platform GUI toolkit? Because that's the one I want to use, and I bet it's the one a lot of devs would also want to use.

qhoxie 18y ago
Shoes has been more and more impressive lately. I'm not sure about ports or equivalents in Python and Perl, but people are doing great things with it in Ruby. http://github.com/why/shoes http://github.com/why/shoes
- pm 18y ago
  I give two thumbs up for Shoes - I'm learning Ruby just so I can use it. However, running through the list of GUI kits the poster has assessed, Shoes differs significantly in that it incorporates web-style widgets on the desktop. It is much more suited to graphical applications and games than native desktop software. Two thumbs down for wxWidgets. I used the wxPython port to prototype a not-too-complex desktop application, and found it tediously cumbersome (not to mention ugly). I would've been better off coding it natively in Obj-C and then porting it down the track.
gaius 18y ago
The current Tk (8.5 and above) looks a lot better, using native widgets where possible, and Starkit makes deployment of Tcl/Tk applications a breeze. Those who forget history are doomed to reimplement it.
- davidw 18y ago
  I think that Tcl and Tk have a terrible "marketing operation" and haven't done a very good job of getting the word out about things like this - it's a huge improvement. This has some screenshots, which are a bit out of date, but show that things have improved: http://tktable.sourceforge.net/tile/ http://tktable.sourceforge.net/tile/
  - moder 18y ago
    Looking at the Tile screenshots for Unix, I don't see any that are antialiased (like the rest of my desktop), though "Revitalized" doesn't look bad at all. (Incidentally, Tile doesn't seem very active. It's last News page update is from 2006.) I think you're right about the "marketing" for Tk. The three things that keep people away from Tk (IMO) are probably: 1. the notion that they'll have to install or use Tcl, 2. the extra work of having to install various plug-ins/theme-engines/whatever to get a more modern-looking GUI, and 3. the revulsion at seeing non-antialiased fonts in GUI widgets. If someone were to come along and bundle up Tcl/Tk with Tile and make the whole thing dead-easy to install and start using, I think that would be a major step forward for Tk. (Hm. Looks like it may have been proposed to do that back in 2005: http://www.tcl.tk/cgi-bin/tct/tip/248 http://www.tcl.tk/cgi-bin/tct/tip/248 . What ever happened to that?)

coryrc 18y ago

wxWidgets is "big" because it has features. Considering it meets all your other criteria (aka features), in addition to ones you'll only find out you need halfway through a project, I would look closer at it. Use wxGlade and wxPython if you want easy, C++ if you demand compiled. Use dabo (http://www.dabodev.com http://www.dabodev.com) if you are interfacing with databases.

koraybalci 18y ago
I have been using wxWidgets for about 5 years now with C++. At first, it was really difficult to do everything in code, hard to change GUI when you need to, very time consuming. But still it was the best option, our project was cross platform. It was also difficult to understand how to build and link. However, once you get the basics it's quite fast and also have threads, networking, file streaming etc, so you don't need a zillion of libraries to do every little thing. Oh, and it has a great OpenGL support (see my projects at http://www.ccsoft.com.tr http://www.ccsoft.com.tr for screenshots) With the help of wxFormBuilder (a free design tool), now design and modfications are very much faster. Besides, it's been there for about 15 years. There is a decent documentation, a book, a large community to answer your questions. My only plan is to do a project on wxPython and polish my python knowledge and see which (C++ or Python) suits me better.
tweiler 18y ago
I am thinking of using wxWidgets as well for my current project, although it doesn't require much of a GUI. All the guts of my app are in cross-platform C++ (by cross-platform I mean Linux, Mac, and Windows). I have connected a small GUI to it in Windows using WTL, but could easily change it to wxWdigets so I have one GUI to maintain and not three.
simpleenigma 18y ago
I ran into a project where I needed a cross platform GUI kit (needed Windows and Mac) and settled on wxWidgets after talking to a few developers. It's been great to work with, although some of the other libraries that are compatible with it don't work as well as the core. The really wonderful part of the experience is that even after not programming in C++ for about 10+ years I was able to get things working pretty quickly and I'm productive with it. A lot of that is due to the wxWidgets documentation and it's well developed structure. My only real problem is when I have to switch back and forth between Erlang and C++. Those days suck :-)
scumola 18y ago
I've used wxWidgets for 7+ years now and loved it even in the early days when the GUI tools sucked and the OpenGL support was poor, but now it's very well polished and my choice for GUI development under linux. If my app needs to be ported to Windows, I just re-compile and it's all nice if I use the wxWidgets version of the network libs, etc ...

tptacek 18y ago

You forgot Swing+Java/Jython/JRuby/Groovy/Clojure.

gaius 18y ago
How I wish I could forget Swing.
- bdittmer 18y ago
  There are some amazing apps built with swing...JetBrains IDEA and jEdit being two.
  - gaius 18y ago
    Interesting to note that two "amazing" apps written with Java are to help Java programmers ...
    - icey 18y ago
      Why is that interesting? Emacs uses a lisp; does that mean anything about emacs or lisp? (Edit: I'm being serious, I guess I don't see why Java being used to write Java editors is a big deal.)
    - bdittmer 18y ago
      To characterize both exclusively as tools to help java programmers shows that you haven't investigated either very much.
  - rs 18y ago
    My jaws dropped when I saw these: http://blog.palantirtech.com/2008/07/04/palantir-screenshots-round-two/ http://blog.palantirtech.com/2008/07/04/palantir-screenshots... I never realised that so much could be done with Swing.
- moder 18y ago
  > How I wish I could forget Swing. Could you explain why? Last time I used Java (years ago), Swing was supposedly replacing AWT. Swing seemed very large (certainly, judging by the page-count of all the Swing books on bookstore shelves), and required a lot of subclassing to use. When I tried it out, it was slow, to be sure, but it was also relatively easy to use. The layout managers worked well for my simple apps. I also liked the "Metal" theme, though others complained that Metal was unreservedly ugly.
  - gaius 18y ago
    Like everything else Java, it just does everything in the most elaborate, baroque and top-heavy way it can. There are so many, so much better ways to build GUIs out there. That's what I meant in my comment about Java editors; you need an enormous amount of tool support to do anything useful in Java because of all the boilerplate you need. Tk on the other hand is an absolute pleasure to use, and I spend almost no time on my GUIs now, I can concentrate on my real code.
    - tptacek 18y ago
      Nobody likes writing Java, but enough people respect the JVM that we have Groovy, Scala, and Clojure. Why couldn't the same thing be true of Swing-the-API vs. Swing-the-underlying-UI-toolkit?
swombat 18y ago
and AIR.
- jeffshadap 18y ago
  AIR now works on Linux too
- wmf 18y ago
  Too bad AIR gives up on native look and feel.

mcandre 18y ago

YelloSoft http://yellosoft.us/ http://yellosoft.us/ I complain about the very same thing. There hasn't been a lot of development effort for building anything cross-platform. Out of fifty LISP implementations I looked at, only a few were cross-compatible. Hardly any computer games are multiplatform. I build my own software and release it on Mac, Linux, and Windows whenever possible. It's been really easy starting with a common code base (C/C++/Java/whatever) and creating the GUI using native tools: Xcode, Visual Studio, Glade. The GUIs end up looking good, are easy to make (if a little more trouble to sync between the OSs), and I don't have to spend hours scouring the 'Net for information on GUIs across several operating systems. It's becoming alarmingly common for Google to return no search results about some computing topics and programming errors. If I can't Google it, I can't fix it. One of my biggest problems has been incomplete programming language support. Why should I learn wxWidgets if wxRuby is half-done? The documentation for RubyCocoa is even less substantial. I can't begin coding unless I understand a minimum of how the various GUI objects interact. I finally understand all those dumb underscores in RubyCocoa methods. Objective C is odd, but consistent. Something like a Swing but C based would be nice, but it's a lot of trouble to wrap native methods (menubars, system trays, pop-ups, etc.) and not that rewarding. It's easier to extend a codebase using native tools for the interface. Proof of concept: IOS7Crypt http://yellosoft.us/index.php?id=55 http://yellosoft.us/index.php?id=55 This app has a ridiculous amount of ports in assorted languages and toolkits. I've done it with Perl, Python, Java, Lua, Ruby, C, C++, and Objective C; on Tkinter, wxWidgets, Gtk, Qt, Glade, Cocoa, Windows forms, Swing, and HTML/Rails. Ultimately, I just use the command line interface and simple Mac/Windows/Linux GUIs. The screenshots are Cocoa, because it naturally looks the best! newLISP version coming soon.

moder 18y ago
Have you tried Tk8.5? It looks like there have been some pretty substantial improvements since 8.4.