Menu
Is WxWidgets relevant in 2015? Last release was on October 06, 2014, is this project dead? Is there any reason to pick it over Qt?
485
Currently wxWidgets is developed and maintained by Julian Smart, Vadim Zeitlin, Stefan Csomor, Robert Roebling, Vaclav Slavik and many others. More information about wxWidgets is available on its web site at http://www.wxwidgets.org.
One key difference between wxWidgets and Qt or GTK is that wxWidgets, as far as I know, uses native controls to create the UI, unlike Qt or GTK which draw everything themselves. Qt is really good at imitating a native feeling but wxWidgets provides a real native UX.
wxWidgets covers systems such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS (Carbon and Cocoa), iOS (Cocoa Touch), Linux/Unix (X11, Motif, and GTK), OpenVMS, OS/2 and AmigaOS.
wxWidgets is a C++ library that lets developers create applications for Windows, macOS, Linux and other platforms with a single code base.
Yes, wxWidgets is relevant in 2015 for writing portable desktop applications with native look and feel, nothing much has changed there.Reasons for choosing wx over Qt remain the same as always too, see e.g. this answer. What did change is that in many cases you need to target mobile platforms (where wxWidgets is much less relevant as it only has some support for iOS and still not for anything else) or may choose the HTML+JS approach -- but this is a separate decision.
The project is certainly mature (who wouldn't, after 20+ years), but is not dead at all. You can look at the commit activity to check for yourself. If you think that 11 months since the last release is too long to wait for, you are absolutely free to use the latest Git master (which does have quite a number of improvements) or switch to one of JavaScript frameworks.
57
I do agree with Dr.Vadim, 11 months (now 12 months) is not too long to wait for another recent release. Since it first release 20+ years ago, wxWidgets now is become really mature library and provide you very complete documentation. wxWidgets also makes GUI component look native in the desktop's OS where it appeared... be it windows, linux or mac...
I'm also heavy user of wxWidgets due to it's ability to yields portable application, maturity, complete documentation, updated and licensing scheme reasons. Binary application yields by this library is very small, even for statically linking compare to qt.
For those reasons, developing an application for ARM architecture with limited cpu speed and memory will be satisfied by wxWidgets library.
CMIIW, I believe, future of portable and embedded application will belong to wxWidgets...
This link is my experience to build wx library and application for Raspberry Pi: http://yasriady.blogspot.co.id/2015/10/how-to-build-wxwidgets-for-raspberry-pi.html, and as the result, my application running smooth and happy in Raspbian...
You might try to make a comparison for those reasons as well.... and see if wx will match your expectation....
UPDATED (12-Jan-2016): Ready used and easy installation wxWidgets/Eclipse-IDE/Toolchain cross compiler, please do follow this link: http://yasriady.blogspot.co.id/2016/01/raspberry-pi-toolchain.html
10
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
