GUI Library Choice
- Posted by mattlewis (admin) Mar 31, 2011
- 2730 views
Forked from Re: Euphoria 4.0.1 Released
I don't know how much time you have had to test 4.0.1 with Winlib and with the wxEuphoria. Anyway, when convenient, I am hoping for a firm statement from you about which library to use and which works well and what bugs remain to be ironed out, etc. There is no hurry, but hopefully, you or somebody else can advise us in the next month or so. Also, if possible, the URL to the exact version to use.
As usual with programming questions, the answer is, "It depends." Here, I think is a reasonable comparison (off the top of my head, and to which others can no doubt add to), from which you can decide which is right for you:
| Win32Lib | wxEuphoria | |
|---|---|---|
| Home page | http://win32libex.sourceforge.net | http://wxeuphoria.sourceforge.net |
| Written in | 100% euphoria, no external requirements | Requires external DLL / shared library |
| OS / Platform | Windows 32-bit Only | Cross platform, 32 or 64-bit (No 64-bit code has been officially released, either for euphoria or wxEuphoria. However, 64-bit euphoria 4.1 works with a 64-bit build of wxEuphoria from svn, at least on Linux.) |
| Character Encoding | ANSI | ANSI or Unicode, depending on Library build |
| IDEs | IDE available written in pure euphoria | 3rd party wxWidgets GUI designers are available, and using the XML resource output, can be used in wxEuphoria using wxXmlResource |
| Control placement and sizing | Pixel placement of widgets, though 3rd party tools exist for automatic resizing | Sizers built in |
| Grid / Tables | 3rd party library exists, some support in IDE (?) | wxGrid |
| Extra capabilities | Memory / structure management | Regular expressions, XML |
The current Win32Lib head of svn works with euphoria 4.0, though I think there are issues with the IDE, as have been discussed. I know that Derek is working to update Win32Lib, and I think once that gets to a certain point, the IDE.
I would generally recommend the latest release of wxEuphoria. On some Linux distributions, you may need to build the library, as your package manager might install a different version of wxWidgets than what I have. The "official" release is usually built on an up to date Ubuntu machine.
I'm not currently aware of bugs in either library, which is not to say that they don't exist. I've worked on both libraries in the past, and plan to work on both in the future, though when I personally write GUI apps, I use wxEuphoria. There are other choices, such as Arwen, EuIuP, EuGTK, and probably others that I'm forgetting. I have less experience with these. Others can fill in the blanks in the above tables for their favorite libraries.
Matt
