Cross-Platform C++ GUI Library

[kibestar]

Hi. I want to know what GUI library is the best for C++. FLTK, GTK, Qt or wxWidgets. And why, please.
Thanks in advance.

[martinpjvr]

hi,

i cannot talk to much about FLTK, Qt or wxWidget, however i've been using GTK+ and its gtkmm (C++ wrapper) for some time now in both linux and windows.

GTK has quite a footprint to be pre-installed before any development on Windows (about 17MB with version 2.16) with Linux most of the time the distro's have the environment already setup.

(the above statement will basiccaly be true for all the GUI API's)

GTK+ (C API) is not to complicated, however the documentation could be improved. i've found gtkmm (C++ wrapper) a bit more helpfull since they have a nice amalgamated web-site http://www.gtkmm.org/. (also they have a supported development release for Windows.)

a nice layout manager is also available in the form of Glade 3.xx. it generates a XML resource file that can be loaded in your source and you should have your GUI (avoids some programming around building GUI by hand)

i would reccommend you look at wxWidgets also, as i've mentioned i have not used it myself, but i heard good things (although some complain about its runtime footprint being large). Codeblocks IDE is build with wxWidgets...

Qt is more for the KDE environment however you can use it in GNOME.

FLTK sorry not used it...

hope this helps, somewhat ;)
regards,
martin

[writetonsharma]

Some more from me:

for cross platform use QT, its oops & C++, easy to learn, lots of functionality (around 500 class if i am correct) and many famous applications like google earth, VLC, KDE are developed using qt.
for platform specific like only for windows, VC++ (win32, mfc) would be good.
for creating more specialized gui applications you can go for opengl or directx.