Help needed in writing a GUI app in C

Question

Hi Fellow programmers,

I want to write a standalone GUI based app for administering one of the most popular enterprise middleware products from a very big company. But that big company already has a admin tool and its free. But guess what , its very very slow , since its written on the java/Eclipse platform.

I want to write a very fast responsive GUI tool natively for windows.

I do not have much experience programming for windows , So what library(open source preferably) i can use on windows to get the job done.

Note: I need to write it in C, Not C++ , But if i dont have any choice I guess i can do with C++. So I basically need to write a GUI app in C with some good GUI library.

Please help me out.

Thanks.

Edit : I do not know OOP and don't prefer using it.

Edit : So my choice is down to Win32API and Qt. my requirement is that of a simple GUI , nothing fancy. I will be using simple windows ,buttons and menus. But I may need to do some processing , which means GUI should not take up much resources. Based on this I m thinking of using Win32 API , even if I have to take the pain to hopefully satisfy the users.

Answer 1

Why are you limiting yourself to C? Windows Forms and WPF and SIlverLight are all viable UI frameworks that are responsive and have tons of books. There's a reason you can't find much info about writing GUI apps in C - people don't do it.

Answer 2

If you really have to use C then you can use GTK+. Otherwise, I'd suggest a C++ library like QT or wxWidgets. However, that being said I still think it would be preferable to build a .NET (Windows Forms or WPF) solution. They should provide a better UI experience than Java/Swing.

Answer 3

Most GUI toolkits are written in C++, so restricting yourself to C will limit your options somewhat. One option that is cross platform and written in C is GTK; it's originally for X, but runs on Windows as well.

edit: Of course, you could always just program directly against the Windows API (formerly know as Win32) itself. For simple GUIs, it's not too bad.

Answer 4

GUI components map very well into Object oriented paradigm. Using C for GUI applications is a bad idea, I've been there and it's much more confortable to do it in an propper OO fashion with C++. Of course you can sort of do OO with C but it's ugly to say the least.

Answer 5

For plain C, cross platform, native look, simple, scriptable UI, I suggest to have a look at IUP: http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/

Answer 6

If you really want to do it in C, you could use the Win32 API. But it's hell working with it. The Object Oriented variant isn't much better either, but it takes away a bit of the pain (MFC).

Answer 7

its very very slow , since its written on the java/Eclipse platform.

Are you sure that this is the reason for the application's slowness? I am no fan of Java, but before you reach any conclusion, have you made sure that writing the software in c makes it noticably faster? It could be that the application is slow for reasons that are not under the control of the GUI programmer, such as a slow database or bad network latencies.

Also, I don't mean to be rude here, but do

I want to write a very fast responsive GUI tool natively for windows.

and

I do not have much experience programming for windows

not contradict each other?

Answer 8

If you want to write a C GUI app, stick to Win32 or GTK+.

Win32 is blazingly fast, and will let you access everything available to Windows. Take a look at this tutorial.

GTK+ is extremely easy to use, cross platform, and provides tons of extra functionality. Start by downloading the all-in-one bundle, and move onto a tutorial and the documentation.

Personally I'd recommend going straight to Python if you need quick, responsive GUIs, and just need to wrap some lower level stuff.

Answer 9

I strongly recommend you to use C++ with the Qt library, which is both cross-platform and open-source (LGPL). C++ Qt GUI applications are as fast as native Win32 applications, although they take more memory. And you can't even start comparing the productivity gains - Qt is a great library, terrifically designed for GUI programming with tons of other useful tools.

Answer 10

In my opinion, more than the GUI frameworks you need to really work on the design of the application you building.

For a normal GUI in C/C++ Win32 provides enough of controls for a decent looking application with good response time.

What you should really focus on is how to make it multi-thread based upon the time your modules take for execution.

Consider this small example: You have a DataBase connection monitoring in your GUI which is probed every second. Another module may be sending some big files to other applications. Now if an application is single threaded, your GUI is bound to have response problem. If you database connection is very slow due to some network/db issue your app will hang irrespective of the GUI frameworks or hardware chosen, if it was a single threaded app.

But if you write a good design and dedicate a separate thread for GUI handling and other threads for handing background tasks, you will have a really good GUI response. That way you can perform other tasks in background and GUI gets updated when notification is obtained. Remember, it wont happen magically and you need to sync you threads and update GUI.

Also, avoid creating threads for each and every task. You need to check things which can take more time like sending big files or faster tasks like checking/reading if config file exists or not.

By using third party GUI frameworks you are increasing your dependencies in your application and you would require to ship additional dlls etc with you main application. With win32 things are pretty neat.