Approaches to a GUI for a Large C Program

Question

In our Bioinformatics lab we've recently been asked to create a GUI for a program written (and optimized) in C. Any GUI we designed would need to be able to feed input to and receive output from the C program, while also being easily portable to both Windows and Mac. What are ways to go about doing this?

Answer 1

If your looking for a GUI toolkit that works on windows/mac in C, have you considered GTK?

Answer 2

You could write the front end GUIs in Java, and have them feed input and receive output from your C programs. I've known a couple of groups here at work that do something similar with C# and C code (but they don't have the multi-platform restraint).

This way you don't necessarily have to create your GUIs using a C toolkit.

Answer 3

Depending on the nature of the program, you could create an entirely separate GUI application (in any language you prefer), and fork/execute the existing program from it, redirecting it's stdin and stdout to your GUI program. Depending on how the existing program works, this could work well, or be very cumbersome.

You could also extend the existing program with GUI code in something like GTK (which has a C API), or you could use Qt (which is C++, but there's usually no problems calling C functions from C++ if you define them as 'extern "C"').

Answer 4

Download QT or wxWidgets.

Why do the hard work when someone already has and will let you use it for free? I prefer QT myself, btw.

Edit: It does mean using C++ but it will work perfectly with C code.

Answer 5

There are a number of scripting with languages that can make this easy. I'd go for tcl/tk it works on mac pretty much out of the box, and is cross platform across pretty much any machine you can think of.

Also GTK is great and a number of scripting languages have bindings for it.

You probably don't want to write your gui in c if you don't have to. use a rapid develoment scripting language.

Answer 6

Use a separate program.

It doesn't break the existing code - especially important if the code has bio knowledge that a programmer might not know/understand/test.

Gui's change often, in a couple of years you are going to be rewriting the gui for NewSuperOsToolkit(tm) but the underlying worker code won't change. We have atmospheric modelling code that I'm sure was originally written in latin.

You keep the ability to run the engine code as a batch, in parallel on MPI in the cloud, and a bunch of other ways you haven't thought of.

Answer 7

If you want a native GUI, then go with wxWidgets or QT. (I use wxWidgets ...)

The alternative is to have an HTML based interface using Javascript and CSS. You avoid GUI libraries altogether, you get cross-platform support and the outcome is better on some dimensions, worse on others.

If you really want a standalone user interface, you can integrate it into a binary with something like WebKit.