wxWidgets
Avalonia
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wxWidgets
- Solitaire: Authentic remake of the Windows 95 original
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Building Apps with Tauri and Elixir
The Elixir programming language is no stranger to desktop applications as the language actually supports building them out of the box. It uses wxWidgets: a C++ library that lets developers create applications for Windows, macOS, Linux and other platforms with a single code base. But wxWidgets has a very complex API, and doesn’t solve issues that usually come with desktop applications around packaging.
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WxWidgets – open-source C++ cross platform GUI
Qt is also 100% open/free. In fact, both are available under the LGPL, just that wxWidgets also grants an exception to not have to distribute application sources even when statically linked:
https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets#licence
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Need for GUIs for bioinformatic tools?
But for big programs, ones written in C++? Good luck it won’t be easy at all. You might try wxwidgets or qt. I do not predict trying to click box-ify complex cli tools yielding much success.
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Create desktop application
In theory, you should be able to use FFI to interface with something like wxWindows, but you might again have problems on macOS, I don't know. And to me eyes, Wx looks a bit outdated.
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IUP – Cross platform C GUI library
This seems to be like the classic wxWidgets [1], i.e. it's an API that wraps the underlying platform's default toolkit. So on Windows it uses Windows' native controls, in Linux it seems to use GTK, and so on.
That means that the advantage is being able to write against one API, and get cross-platform compatibility, which can be nice. It also means (typically) being limited in what you can do to the least common denominator, or you (=the toolkit author) end up having to re-implement features from one platform that you want to expose but that are missing on some supported target(s). Or, of course, have an API with non-portable parts in it.
In any case, it means the "look and feel" is not the core feature of the API since that is going to be "like the target platform" and that is the point.
Given the origin, I guess Lua support is important too, here.
[1]: https://www.wxwidgets.org/
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Creating C++ windowed applications
- So, I found wxWidgets. Which looked good. However, when I followed some tutorials I was getting errors. Even when I copied and pasted the tutorial code. Furthermore, the library still doesn't seem to simplify the process much.
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What does this icon belong to? I've seen it used in many pieces of software, but I never found out what it actually is from.
It is the icon for WXWidgets, a programming toolkit for making user interfaces that work on Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
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Inkscape is hiring: Accelerating the GTK4 migration
In general, people will use a cross-platform library to port such applications. While QT will likely never really stabilize (I'd flag it unsustainable), the https://www.wxwidgets.org/ is able to be statically linked into commercial and opensource projects at no cost without tripping GPL.
"Hiring a senior C++ developer with GTK experience is costlier"
I think you are confusing skill valuation, and operational productivity. Some have an erroneous notion talent is interchangeable. Likewise, applicants with identical base skill-sets on their CV often mistakenly believe they even have long-term employment options (outsourced, youth tax credit churn, and or senior wage suppression).
Most FOSS people are easier to train, as most already can mitigate utter chaos already. =)
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Is it possible to build a gui which is both cross compatible and native?
There are a few like that in the C++ community. WxWidgets is the most famous/popular with this approach. But it is a library almost impossible to use in other languages because their api is heavily templated.
Avalonia
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Industrial Controller? Windows or Linux?
You might also want to look at AvaloniaUI[0] for a cross platform .NET GUI library. It is similar to WPF but much nicer to work with.
[0] https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia
- Avalonia – Farewell to the .NET Foundation
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AvaloniaUI: Create Multi-Platform Apps with .NET
Production user here. There's no money gotchas. They're above reproach. In fact, I've received considerable free support from their devs on GitHub Issues [1].
The Avalonia business model is based on selling XPF, which runs WPF (Windows-only) apps on other platforms. That's very interesting to big corps with existing codebases.
See my comment [2]
[1] https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/issues
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246988#39249128
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.NET on Linux: What a Contrast
Yes, but the portable GUI frameworks by Microsoft themselves are generally not very good, and they tend to be abandoned after a couple of years.
Avalonia is developed outside of the Microsoft corporate madness and seems to be slowly becoming the defacto cross-platform framework because it is expected to last a bit longer than a manager's attention span: https://avaloniaui.net/
- Too many Mac apps are being built with Electron
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Ask HN: Do you have a problem you'd pay to have taken away?
Not my comment, but relevant here "The problem with compiling Skia to WASM is you'll lose any benefits of hardware graphics acceleration on the device."
(From https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/discussions/6831#disc... )
- Dezvoltare aplicatie desktop
- Ask HN: How to create web, mobile, and desktop apps from a single code base?
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.NET 8 – .NET Blog
It's a bit of a hit and miss as of today. CLI, back-end and natively compiled libraries (think dll/so/dylib or even .lib/.a - you can statically link NAOT binaries into other "unmanaged" code) work best, GUI - requires more work.
Avalonia[0] and MAUI[1] have known working templates with it, but YMMV.
[0] https://github.com/lixinyang123/AvaloniaAOT / https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/ / honorable mention https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup
[1] https://github.com/dotnet/maui (try out with just true in csproj - it is known to work e.g. on iOS)
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One Game, by One Man, on Six Platforms: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
For desktop, Avalonia, hands down.
https://avaloniaui.net/
Open source, powered by Skia, backed by JetBrains, and quite battle-tested at this point for small to medium-sized apps. In theory perfectly capable for enterprise as well, since it's basically a spiritual successor to WPF, which has been an industry standard for about 15 years.
They're diving into mobile and WASM well, but that's more of a recent effort and I haven't tested that yet.
What are some alternatives?
imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies
Uno Platform - Build Mobile, Desktop and WebAssembly apps with C# and XAML. Today. Open source and professionally supported.
FLTK - FLTK - Fast Light Tool Kit - https://github.com/fltk/fltk - cross platform GUI development
Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) - .NET MAUI is the .NET Multi-platform App UI, a framework for building native device applications spanning mobile, tablet, and desktop.
gtkmm - Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtkmm
WPF - WPF is a .NET Core UI framework for building Windows desktop applications.
GTK+ - Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk
Eto.Forms - Cross platform GUI framework for desktop and mobile applications in .NET
nana - a modern C++ GUI library
MahApps.Metro - A framework that allows developers to cobble together a better UI for their own WPF applications with minimal effort.
libui - Simple and portable (but not inflexible) GUI library in C that uses the native GUI technologies of each platform it supports.
Gtk# - Gtk# is a Mono/.NET binding to the cross platform Gtk+ GUI toolkit and the foundation of most GUI apps built with Mono