Re: wxWindows vs. FLTK

[Juergen Fuhrmann <fuhrmann@...>]

>  Wed, 12 Feb 2003 14:03:28 -0800
>  "Nick Trout" <ntrout@rockstarvancouver.com> wrote:
>
>  
>  I started writing a Lua Editor/Debugger in wxWindows and I was surprised
>  how small the exe was when I statically compiled wxWindows (400/500k if
>  I recall - considering the size of the library anyway). There is a lot
>  you can remove. I did some homework when I was choosing a GUI for Lua
>  and the Lua community and these are my notes (granted FLTK now has a Mac
>  port):
>  
>  http://lua-users.org/wiki/VisLuaImplementation
>  
>  I came down on the size of wxWindows because:
>  
>  * It has the largest widget set.
>  
>  * It's the most portable.

 Still to be tested... see below.

  
>  * It is very well supported and has a large community (FLTKs look pretty
>  good too)
>  
>  * wxStyledTextCtrl which is basically Scintilla
>  (http://www.scintilla.org/SciTEImage.html) wrapped (and quite nicely).
>  Note, this has a lexer for Lua built in. 
>  
>  * It has SWIG support so in the event that I end up having to bind it,
>  it could be done using LuaSWIG.

I liked the idea of swig, but it  was a pain for me to use LuaSWIG, (I
did not  find out  how to  bind garbage collectors  for C  objects). I
dropped it for tolua (and thus decided to go with Lua maybe "forever")
and I am happy with this. 


>  * I didn't like the FLTK GUI editor and there werent any others.
>  wxWindows has a number of commercial and open solutions.

I am  no specialist in  GUI building, so  I cannot judge. I  need just
something lean with OpenGL in there where a user can click on. I would
not like to  have a to install  a GUI package which is  larger than my
app on a user's box.


>  I agree that it would be better to have more than one solution but I
>  also think binding and maintaining an evolving GUI library is a lot of
>  work, so the effort would be best spent on one solution initially. 

I basically agree on this. Do not split forces for maintaing different
GUIs.

I took  the wxwindows-2.3..  snapshot and  wxwindows-2.4.0 release and
tried to  get one of them running  on my desktop Tru64  alpha box.  It
does not  work out-of-the-box. With investing  some time, I  am sure I
could fight  it through,  but not  without pain.  For  now, I  have to
stop.  Neihter with Lua, nor with FLTK I felt that pain.


The system may  seem to be a  bit exotic, but it indeed  is very clean
POSIX, the only  "difference" is that it is 64  bit from the beginnig,
and  this is pain  for many  packages which  make some  assumptions on
pointer sizes.   We have  64 bit transitions  still going on  on Irix,
Solaris, AIX. All of these are a must for me.



Juergen