I'm leaning towards Gtk+ because I'm more familiar with it (I used to be very involved in that community, in fact) and because I know its Unicode support is good.
back
6 comments
Please consider Qt as well, the implementation is solid and its easy to make apps that are performant and polished.
Qt 4 or 5? I had difficulty getting even "hello world" running in 5, and the size of deploy binaries (~16M) was scary. Maybe that doesn't matter so much if it'll primarily be using system libraries.
What went wrong with 5? And yeah use dynamic linking, that's what it's for.
The specific thing that went wrong was trying to use the homebrew version. 4 just worked out of the box, no hassle. I do of course have access to a Linux machine, but it'd be convenient to do development on my Mac as well. I'm willing to give it another shot but need to be convinced it's worthwhile.
Well, I think Qt looks really pretty and generally prefer Qt apps over GTK versions. I find it nicer as a programmer too. I've known projects to migrate from GTK to Qt (in particular Rosegarden, which used to have a great blog post about how much nicer it made everything that I sadly can't find now) - looking at https://www.wikivs.com/wiki/GTK_vs_Qt there's a big list of projects that have switched from GTK to Qt and none that have gone in the other direction.
The binary size is mostly due to improved unicode support (libicu) and QML.
At this point? 5, definitely :)
I use Qt4 and QWidgets - its by far the most pleasant desktop UI development toolkit Ive used. (Ive used qt, gtk, wx, win32 with gdi/gdi+ and a bit of swing).
btw, Raph: Have you seen Neil Brown's edlib? Might be an interesting datapoint if nothing else. (It's written in C, Neil being a kernel hacker and all.)
http://blog.neil.brown.name/category/edlib/ https://github.com/neilbrown/edlib
If you want to experiment with Gtk, trying using Vala instead of C. Vala is to (GObject C) what Swift is to Objective-C.
Unfortunately, some people take Gtk+ as the standard, but it's certainly the one that feels the least native outside of Gnome, while Qt apps will happily adopt the appearance of the Gtk theme in use. Only EFL out of the big toolkits manages to look even more foreign than Gtk.
I wonder how much of that comes from the different method/implementation of storing themes in binary .edj files rather than in textual format like GTK. (Don't know enough about Qt theming to comment on that).
Would doing the linux frontend in swift/gtk leverage any existing swift code?
Probably not a lot. The Swift code is basically for plumbing to the GUI toolkit. All the actual text processing is done in the core.
Lovely to see you outside the Google Black Hole, Raph. (And using Rust!)