Building simple GUI without resorting QT or .NET using native C++?

Question

Are there any platforms to build GUI platform without resorting to QT or .NET using native C++ ?

QT is cool, but take a lot of time to learn, in addition it has a lot of things I don't really need and really dislike QT IDE, compared to Visual Studio (I know you can use QT within Visual Studio)

.NET suffers same problem (I am actually learning C# and WPF right now, though it looks like WPF is somewhat easier to program and you can call native C++ code from WPF)

I am looking for something that is: relatively easy learn, does not have to have advanced features, works with C++11, support C++11 multi-threading, works with Visual Studio. Planning to build some applications for Numerical analysis.

Answer 1

There are lots of alternatives with varying levels of support in VS.

MFC has quite a bit of direct support in Visual Studio in the form of code generators, Wizards, etc. Unfortunately, the basic design is very old and hasn't aged very gracefully at all. Quite a few programmers not only would but do cite it as a prime example of a library that's better avoided if humanly possible.

WTL is Microsoft's other class library for producing Windows applications. It's a much newer design than MFC and generally considered much cleaner and nicer. As implied by the name, it's heavily template based, which helps it produce applications that are generally considerably smaller and faster than MFC ever attempted. For better or worse, Microsoft placed it under a fairly permissive open-source license some time ago, and updates since then have been quite minimal. Despite both being from Microsoft, Visual Studio has never done much to support WTL development.

wxWidgets started as more or less a clone of Microsoft's MFC, but has continued active development while MFC has mostly stagnated. It now has quite a few features (e.g., XML-based UI design, layout managers) far beyond anything MFC ever even considered including.

Ultimate++ is a fairly unusual toolkit that has mapped its own route (so to speak) that's quite a bit different from most others. They have their own IDE (TheIDE). Code can be quite simple and short, but is enough different from most typical C++ that many people find it difficult to grasp at first (and some experienced C++ programmers don't particularly like how some thing work).

GTK+/gtkmm is less of a Windows framework than a Linux framework that's portable enough to also work under Windows. It's probably not your best choice if you're developing exclusively (or even primarily) for Windows. These are also much more purely GUI frameworks than most others (i.e., they don't include things like collections, networking, cryptography, etc., that many others do include).

FLTK is another cross-platform toolkit. Its fairly small and fast, but somewhat like GTK+, it seems (at least to me) less like a Windows toolkit, than a Linux toolkit that happens to be portable enough that it can also work on Windows (but the results don't look or feel much like most Windows applications).

Juce was originally used to develop some music software (Traktion) so it includes a lot of music-oriented functionality. It also have some fairly unusual widgets that most others don't include (especially widgets that imitate controls you'd see on all sorts of audio equipment). Nonetheless, it has a solid core of basic GUI functionality, as well as the usual "extras" like network, crypto, XML and JSON, etc. Although I haven't tried to do anything like a full review of the code, it appears to be rather better written than most.

That's not a complete list by any means, but I think it hits most of the more popular/widely used GUI toolkits (other than Qt, of course).

Answer 2

Some time ago I asked myself exactly that same question.

I wrote my program using C++/CLI, which was not bad (my C++ code was very well isolated from the GUI/CLI part), but sharing the executable with others was a problem: it was the typical - it runs in my PC(...only). So, I needed a light alternative to the user unfriendly command line programs in scientific calculations, which I could easily share.
I am now happy to use Nana. Please join the group of users and / or developers of Nana and... have fun!

GUI with Nana C++ Library

Nana C++ Library takes aim at easy-to-use and portable library. It provides a GUI framework and threads for easy programming with modern C++ methods, such as traits, metaprogramming and other template technologies.