Modern C++ GUI library for Windows, suggestions?

Question

Hello,

First of all I do know that there is already an identical question but that was answered 2 years ago. It can be found here. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/115045/good-c-gui-library-for-windows

I have exactly the same question as that guy above. Even my demands from a GUI library are the same as his bullet point. For my projects I mostly use wxWidgets but I would like to change into another library too, see other more modern options and have the flexibility of knowing how to use more than one GUI library. Contrary to now, that I only know how to use wxWidgets.

Has anything changed in these two years? Things in our field progress fast. Is the only other good library out there Qt? Thanks for any answers and sorry if this is considered a repeat question.

Answer 1

You should also look at Juce: Juce Library

GNU public licensed for non-commercial work, relatively inexpensive for commercial work.

Answer 2

QT is the obvious choice. wxWidget seems to be good as well. The other possibility is Windows.Forms and/or WPF via C++/CLI.

Answer 3

On Windows environments I would think in Qt too. It is available under both commercial and the LGPL open source licenses. And you can easily find answers to your questions over the net.

Answer 4

Another possibility is Gtk+. which has its own wrapper for C++, called Gtkmm:

http://www.gtkmm.org/

Gtk+ is nearly an standard in linux, if you are considering Linux programming, maybe this is a good solution. In the other hand, you can also port your applications to Windows without a lot of hassle (actually no hassle if you write portable code). The license is LGPL.

If you are considering Windows programming, then maybe Visual C++ with Win.Forms.

If you are just interested in a quick and small GUI library, then FLTK is your option:

http://www.fltk.org/

FLTK is licensed through GPL2.

Answer 5

There are none, unfortunatelly. Qt is anything but modern, both in look and design. If you want to provide your users with modern look and use native code, pretty much your only option is something like Direct2D with DirectWrite and Windows Animation Manager. One thing to be aware is that those technologies are not available for XP and older systems.

Answer 6

I gave up with WxWidgets very quickly, loads of build problems, just went on and on. If you use CodeBlocks (a nice IDE, but..) it pops up some dialog box asking you to define a compiler variable. CBA to chase that one.

Qt seems to require everything to be derived from some Qt class (don't know, haven't used it, but remember reading it somewhere) which is no good for me.

JUCE compiled out of the box. Works with VC2010 Express on 64 bit windows 7.