Programs Using Wxwidgets
The previous post,? Looked at some of the advantages and disadvantages of developing C applications for either of those two frameworks. This post provides a high-level look at a number of toolkits for GUI programming in C for those frameworks.
I have no intention of covering all toolkits, only the ones I have used, or contemplated using for more than a few minutes. See Wikipedia for a larger. MS Windows-Only APIs and Toolkits Microsoft has provided a number of toolkits and APIs for developing C applications on Win32 and UWP. The oldest ones are for Win32 development and the newest ones are for UWP. Because Win32 has been around a much longer time, there are more toolkits for developing Win32 applications than for developing UWP applications.
Let’s look at a few. Win32 Any mentions of Win32 in this post also refer to Win64, the 64-bit equivalent of Win32. Windows API The Windows API (sometimes referred to as Win32 API) is a C-based library that has been around since the days of Windows 1.0 (originally Win16). This was the first toolkit used to build Windows applications and still remains somewhat popular today, especially for C applications. However, being a C interface, it tends to be long-winded; for example, the first Hello World application built using Win16 required only 150 lines of code.
I would recommend looking at one of the C toolkits instead. MFC MFC, the Microsoft Foundation Classes, was released in 1992 as a very thin wrapper around the Windows API. MFC is still available in various versions of Visual Studio, though it was previously not included in Visual Studio Express versions. While some people still develop applications using MFC, and of course there is a large number of legacy MFC applications, there are now better choices available for developing new applications. WTL WTL, the Windows Template Library, was developed originally for use internally by Microsoft, and was later released as an unsupported add-on to Visual Studio. WTL provides a light-weight alternative to MFC. I have not used WTL so I can’t comment on it, other than it is now available as a download from Sourceforge.
Others A number of other Win32-specific toolkits have come and gone. As an alternative to any of the toolkits mentioned above, you may wish to consider one of the cross-platform toolkits which are listed in a section below. UWP Universal Windows Platform is Microsoft’s new framework for building Windows programs.
Unlike Win32, which is limited to running on x64/x64 processors, UWP applications can also be built to run on ARM processors. This opens UWP applications up to running on desktops, laptops, tablets, XBox systems, HoloLens systems, Windows phones, and any other hardware that runs Windows 10. UWP uses the Windows RunTime architecture (WinRT). WinRT provides a set of APIs that expose all of the functionality of Windows 10 to developers. See the for more information.Net and the Common Language Runtime (CLR) are a subplatform of the Windows Runtime.
Game Develop is game development software, using wxWidgets for all GUI related tasks, allowing creation of any kind of 2D game without needing any knowledge in a specific language. Everything is made using visual editors and the software uses an event-based system, using conditions which have to be filled so as to.
C/CX C/CX is a set of extensions to Visual C for building UWP applications. This greatly reduces the amount of plumbing code required to interface to WinRT, but at the expense of unfamiliar code syntax. All functionality exposed by WinRT can be programmed using C/CX.
C/CX supports using XAML to define a program’s user interface. WRL The Windows Runtime C Library (WRL) provides a low-level interface to the Windows Runtime. There is more boiler-plate code than in C/CX, but at least it is standard, though not modern C. For example, there are no modern types and no move semantics.
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C/WinRT C/WinRT is a standard C language projection implemented entirely as a set of header files. It does not use language extensions like C/CX does, and avoids the complexity, verbosity, and tediousness of WRL. One disadvantage is that XAML is not currently supported; XAML will be provided in a later version. Cross Platform Toolkits All of the toolkits mentioned below have been under active development for 20 or more years. They were started before C98; to support backwards compatibility, they all suffer from a number of limitations. For example:. No namespaces;.
Use raw pointers rather than smart pointers; and. Pass parameters as raw pointers rather than references. There are many other limitations, but you get the idea. WxWidgets wxWidgets is the only toolkit that uses native libraries to create and display windows and widgets.
On Windows, wxWidgets uses Win32, on OSX it uses Cocoa, and on Linux and other Unix-like systems it uses gtk+. Attempts were made to produce ports for both Android and iOS, but they never got past the pre-alpha stage. Gtkmm gtkmm is a C wrapper around gtk+. Gtk+ is the C API that is used on the Gnome desktop for Linux and Unix-like operating systems. It has been ported to Windows and OSX, and generally works well but with a few limitations on the fringes. For example, see my comments about printing and printer properties in.
Qt Qt is available for the largest number of operating systems: Win32 and WinRT, OSX, Linux and many Unix-like OSes, Android, iOS, and embedded operating systems. Qt is the API used for the KDE desktop which runs on Linux and many Unix-like OSes. It is the oldest and best supported of the cross-platform toolkits.
It is under constant development. Fltk The Fast Light Toolkit is the lightest of the toolkits mentioned here.
Programs Using Wxwidgets
It provides only GUI functionality and does not provide helper classes like the toolkits mentioned above. The look and feel of its widgets is somewhat reminiscent of Motif from the 1990’s. Fltk is available for Win32, OSX, and Linux.
Others Other toolkits are either lesser known or created for specific purposes, such as toolkits for gaming and toolkits that use and are designed for use with OpenGL, and in some cases, Vulkan. What Have I Used? All of my programming in the last 3 years or so has been on MS Windows systems, with most programs using wxWidgets for the GUI. In the past, I programmed using gtkmm and the Win32 API.
More than 20 years ago I used MFC. I have also programmed GUIs in other languages, but they are not the topic of this post. Summary This post has provided a list and overview of a number of toolkits that can be used to program GUIs on computers running MS Windows. Hopefully I have provided sufficient information for you to limit the amount of investigation you need to do to select a GUI toolkit that is appropriate for your new applications.
Additional Information Additional information on each of the platforms and toolkits may be obtained from the following links:. Alexander Overvoorde wrote a good tutorial for programming Vulkan; this is available. In the tutorial, he used GLFW as the windowing system. This is fine if your application uses one main window with no adornments such as menus and status bars, and no additional windows. I have modified the Hello Triangle example to use wxWidgets. This corresponds to the code up to the end of the Drawing a triangle section of the tutorial. The source code of my wxWidgets version is available on.
Here is a description of the changes:. HelloTriangleApplication code is split among VulkanTutorialApp, VulkanWindow, and VulkanCanvas.
The vast majority of the code is placed in VulkanCanvas. Specifically, the code in HelloTriangleApplication::run is split into two parts:. The line: mainloop is handled automatically by VulkanTutorialApp, and to some extent by VulkanWindow. The functionality in initWindow and initVulkan are performed in the VulkanCanvas constructor. The HelloTriangleApplication::drawFrame code is placed in VulkanCanvas::OnPaint.
The HelloTriangleApplication::onWindowResized code is placed in VulkanCanvas::OnResize. WxWindow::RefreshRect must be called to ensure that the canvas is redrawn every time the window is resized. Calling wxWindow::Refresh or wxWindow::Updateonly causes a redraw to occur when the window grows in size, not when shrinking is size. Two changes were made regarding exceptions:.
In the tutorial code, runtimeerror exceptions are thrown whenever Vulkan errors are encountered. These are replaced with a new exception type called VulkanException which provides information about the actual Vulkan error that was encountered.
The tutorial code simply outputs text messages to std::cout. Because the wxVulkanTutorial code is Windows-based, there is no console to output the messages to, so they are output to a wxMessageBox.
Programming With Wxwidgets
This was discussed previously in the post. The tutorial code contains a templated class called VDeleter. This class automatically handles the destruction of various Vulkan handles. I have not included this class in wxVulkanTutorial. Instead, I destroy the handles in the VulkanCanvas destructor. Have fun with it. The discussed OpenGL and many potential libraries and windowing toolkits that work with OpenGL.
In this post, I will look at what I use for OpenGL programming on Windows 10 desktop:. Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition;. wxWidgets; and,.
GLEW, the OpenGL Extension Wrangler. The selection of a development environment is very much a personal choice. After using a number of batch build methods and Integrated Development Environments over the last few years, I have settled on Visual Studio as the best choice for me. It contains a C compiler that is C14 compatible and even has the C17 features that have been approved by the C Standards Committee.
Visual Studio 2015 also integrates git for source control, and unit testing via Microsoft Unit Test Framework. There is a memory leak detector included in Debug mode. Note that the leak detector only works on the memory allocated on the CPU and does not detect memory leaks in the GPU. I will be developing some complex applications, so one of the Standard Windowing Toolkit mentioned in my post on, or something similar is required. Since I develop on Windows 10 for the desktop, then any of the standard toolkits will work. Win32 is a C interface that requires a lot of coding to perform any windowing tasks. MFC is a thin shell over Win32.
While it is C, it predates C99 and retains many of the C structures used in Win32. The other full C windowing toolkits, wxWidgets, Qt, and GTKMM, are all multi-platform, and more advanced and C friendly than MFC; any one of them would work.
I chose wxWidgets because it is the only one of the multi-platform toolkits that displays using the native look and feel on Windows. Being multi-platform, it has the advantage over the Windows only toolkits in that any code I develop can be easily ported to other operating systems and windowing systems.
It can even be used atop GTK+ on Windows desktops, although that seems to be counter-productive. Using wxWidgets with Visual Studio is covered in three posts on this blog:., and. Gl.h declares OpenGL 1.1 functions, many of which have been deprecated. It has been supplemented with glu.h and glaux.h, which have also been deprecated.
In order to access the full functionality of the OpenGL API as supported by your graphics card, a loading library is required. I use GLEW because it is easily installed for use with Visual Studio, and a number of the tutorials online use it.
The OpenGL functions are directly callable, unlike some of the other loading libraries that require you to call a function to retrieve a pointer to the requested function before calling the function. Source code and 32- and 64-bit binaries for GLEW are available for Windows on. Alternatively, GLEW is included along with FreeGLUT and FLFW in a NuGet package called nupengl.core. Before loading nupengl.core, you must first create a simple wxWidgets project. The process for this is described in. Select the platform you are building your application for (x86 or x64), and build the project. Once you have done this, you can install nupengl.core.
To do this, select the solution in the Solution Explorer, then select the Tools-NuGet Package Manager-Manage NuGet Packages for Solution. This opens the Nuget – Solution tab shown below: Select the nupengl.core package, then select the projects that you want to include the package in (Hello Triangle in this case). Now click the Install button to install the nupengl.core.
Nuplegl.core.redist is installed at the same time as nupengl.core, so there is no need to install it explicitly. You are now ready to create your first OpenGL application. That is the topic of the next post.,.