Good C++ GUI library for Windows

Question

I'm looking for good windows GUI library for C++. The Ideal in my opinion shoud be:

• Modern. MFC, wxWidgets, Qt were started a long time ago and they don't use modern C++ features and standard library.
• Have a rich set of controls with decent features. The ability to drop HTML almost everywhere is a happiness for which I love wxWidgets when I don't hate it.
• Open source. It's the must. If sources are available after purchase then it's considered ok.
• Have a form designer in some way. Yeah, it would be great. After years of Delphi I cry every time when I have to specify control sizes by hand...
• Free for commercial use. But if some library is REALLY good I will consider buying it.
• Cross platform. Just a wish:) I can live without that.

Please suggest your candidates. One library per answer please.

P.S. I'm sorry for inevitable grammar errors. English is not my native language.

Answer 1

WTL is a modern GUI framework created by Nenad Stefanovic from the ATL team. It is light-weight but still supports all the modern features of the OS.

Windows Template Library

Windows Template Library (WTL) is a C++ library for developing Windows applications and UI components. It extends ATL (Active Template Library) and provides a set of classes for controls, dialogs, frame windows, GDI objects, and more.

The unofficial documentation lives at the Code Project.

Answer 2

Not my question, but I'd like a cross-platform version of the same. Something that works on (minimally) Windows, OS X, and Linux. Tweaks would naturally have to be applied to each platform, but being able to design the main components in one place would be nice.

Answer 3

I would take a second look at Qt -- it's not free for commercial use, but they have a good entry-level license if you are just starting out. I think their interface is fairly modern, although I didn't like that they seem to rely on language extensions that they preprocess.

What specifically are you looking for in the Modern category?

Answer 4

wxWidgets - free, allowed for commercial application with many designers available ( http://wxdsgn.sourceforge.net/, http://www.dialogblocks.com/, http://wxformbuilder.org/, http://wxglade.sourceforge.net/ ... ).

I personally write many of my widgets from scratch but this is not an option always.

Answer 5

What about Smartwin++?

Their wiki seems to be down right now. Sample Hello World! code from Smartwin++ docs

Answer 6

I think you're writing Qt off too quickly; it doesn't use the standard library much, but that has less to do with being obsolete than with having different priorities. The QT containers use iterators, template algorithms, etc, but have a different iterator model; Qt iterators point between elements instead of at them. This makes forward and reverse traversal symmetric, and cleans up some edge cases for inserting and removing elements while traversing, though it's a little less efficient. And they do provide STL-style iterators too. It's a valid choice for a GUI library IMO; performance of the containers is unlikely to be the critical factor.

As for the preprocessor (moc), think of it more as an IDL compiler that knows how to read C++ headers instead of needing its own language. It doesn't preprocess your code, which is compiled directly. It just generates an additional cpp file containing the marshaling for signal/slot callbacks, which can get rather messy when they cross thread boundaries and need synchronization.

Qt is free if you can release your sources (even for commercial use; how many in-house tools really need to be proprietary), and not unreasonably priced if you can't (no per-unit royalties or anything particularly annoying)

Answer 7

Have you looked at the Fox toolkit?

Answer 8

You should take a look at gtkmm. It is written in modern c++, uses stl, follows its conventions, includes support for utf-8. What's more, it's open source, cross-platform, and licensed under lgpl. From their site:

Features:

• Use inheritance to derive custom widgets.
• Type-safe signal handlers, in standard C++.
• Polymorphism.
• Use of Standard C++ Library, including strings, containers, and iterators.
• Full internationalisation with UTF8.
• Complete C++ memory management
  • Object composition
  • Automatic deallocation of dynamically allocated widgets.
• Full use of C++ namespaces.
• No macros.
• Cross-platform: Linux (gcc), FreeBSD (gcc), NetBSD (gcc), Solaris (gcc, Forte), Win32 (gcc, MSVC++.Net 2003), MacOS X (gcc), others
• Free software and free of cost for both Open Source and proprietary development.
• Discussed, designed and implemented in public.

Answer 9

Both wx and QT can use the standard library. They contain their own collection classes (as does MFC) from the days, not many years ago when compiler support for STL was patchy. Some additions like copy-on-write strings aren't in the STL yet.

They could both use templates for some of the dispatch mechanisms that are done by macros(wx) or the precompiler(QT) but that wouldn't gain anything except less readable code.

Answer 10

Take a look at eGUI++ its got a nice modern object model. You can see an MDN Article Bring The Simplicity of Windows Forms to Native Apps And you can down load the code from John Torjo's website

Answer 11

I would highly recommend JUCE, it's nice clean modern c++ which is very well documented with doxy comments. It has a wide array of gui classes and its very simple to extend the existing ones. The library covers more than just gui as well, there is lots of code for sound manipulation and generation, for threading, read/writing modern image formats, basic networking and much more. It looks nice too (has a OS X sort of feel by default) and is cross platform.

The down side: Although it is free (in both senses) for non-commercial use, commercial use requires the commercial licence which is quite costly.

All in all, definitely worth a look, I've used it for several hobby projects, one of which I intend to release at some point. It actually makes gui coding in c++ fun, and that's saying something!

Answer 12

I have to throw my hat in with Qt. We are commercial license holder of Qt and while expensive it is worth every dollar. The Qt code base is very solid. The GUI designer is one of the better tools of that kind out there. A while ago we evaluated a group of the GUI toolkits available for windows against each other and Qt came out ahead in every aspect so I have seen some of these other toolkits.

If you want bullets here are mine ...

• Object oriented, Qt has a very nice OO architecture that is very consistent throughout the class hierarchy

• Signals and Slots give you a good way to handle the callback problem always present when developing UIs

• While a little bit overly complicated it steers you towards a MVC architecture of showing data, which is not a bad thing

• In addition to the large set of UI classes there are almost larger set of other classes supporting DB Operations, Threading, Networking and other tasks.

Yes Qt internally uses non STL containers and non STL strings. But don't let that be your criterium for disqualifying QT. The QT containers all have STL like iterators, and the String class has a lot of features. Last but not least, it has good multiplatform support.

Answer 13

Since you named Delphi: You do know Borland C++ Builder also does VCL like Delphi does? You can distribute it for free and you get the source code.

Answer 14

What about winx?

Answer 15

At one time, I had some interest for Ultimate++. Nice license (BSD), an IDE, supports various compilers, used in a number of real world complex applications (quite important!), etc.
I never had time to invest there, but I still see it as an interesting alternative.

Answer 16

I stumbled across this. http://www.atai.org/guitool/

Answer 17

I vote for WTL. Lightweight and native. You can't beat those two criteria from my perspective. I write my model layer in stl c++ and use the native libraries per operating system. This guarantees your apps don't look like ass and allows you to make use of the widest range of features on each os.

For a WTL GUI designer I recommend the excellent but for some reason totally unknown to most WTLBuilder: www.wtlbuilder.com.

Answer 18

Better late than never, but you might find this interesting. Your only requirements that it satisfies are "Open Source", and "Free". It does do something you didn't ask for

• reduce your source code by an order of magnitude

• give you total control over layout, data binding, variable arrays of controls, etc.

When you see how it works, you can easily add your own controls.

BTW - it has one more downside - it's addictive.