Comments on: I’m not dead - Compiling Gtk on Windows

By: dot

dot — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 02:52:45 +0000

> It has less to do with “Native Windows apps are hard” and more to do rn> with “I can write a php app in a day - and I don’t have to compile it so rn> it runs on my mac and my linux box and my Winxp machine and the old rn> win98 machine…rnrnok I thought it was “Native Windows apps are hard” but if not more power to you…

By: auroraeosrose

auroraeosrose — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 05:23:27 +0000

The very basic edition costs $299.00 - I don’t know about you but I don’t have almost three hundred dollars to throw around just to build open source windows apps.rnrnI’ve been learning quite a bit of C and C++ but they lose in two important areas - time to develop and cross-platform deployment. I can write it with php-gtk and run it on OS/2 if I’m nuts enough. I don’t have to compile my program either…the strong point of a scripting language. It has less to do with “Native Windows apps are hard” and more to do with “I can write a php app in a day - and I don’t have to compile it so it runs on my mac and my linux box and my Winxp machine and the old win98 machine…”

By: dot

dot — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 19:20:32 +0000

you should get the paying version of visual studio .net, I think the basic versions is around $100. It makes things easier and it comes with a lot of stuff for learning. you might even end up switching from php to C++ or .Net! Native Windows apps arent’ really that bad to write.

By: auroraeosrose

auroraeosrose — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 22:52:12 +0000

I haven’t had any problems USING gtk+ on win32 - in fact the mingw stock builds work better than fine (even mixing C runtimes doesn’t seem to phase it) The point of building it on msvc is to get around mixing C runtimes - since I’m building php and php-gtk2 (a wrapper for gtk+ which makes working with it fabulous and fast - with all the pluses of php with MSVC 2005 which uses a different C runtime. I don’t actually use C/C++ with Gtk+ - YUCK But with php-gtk2 (like pygtk) you can have an app up and running in five minutes. Web-based is not always the right fit for an application. What happens when you have no internet access? And the problems with an xul/gecko based app is it will have all the weaknesses inherent with mozilla/gecko (can we say strange memory leaks from hell? Don’t try to run an xulbased app overnight on windows…)

By: Todd

Todd — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 14:46:12 +0000

Hey,rn Gtk+ on win32 with msvc isn’t easy. I spent a good year going back and forth building gtk+ on windows. In the end, I realized what I really wanted was to build software and while I enjoyed writing in C/C++ - it’s not the most productive language for every task. Eventually, the requirements for our product pushed me to getting Gecko built and integrated with Gtk+ in windows. This was a huge effort and as before the benefits to me were small. After working more and more with the Gecko platform I realized it would do everything I needed. Plus it integrated very nicely in both Mac and Windows platforms (the primary targets of our consumer base). This drove me to rethink how I was building our application and to ultimately drop Gtk+ as our platform and transition completely over to C++/Javascript in the Xulrunner platform. Finally, after 14 months 10 of which we spent on Gtk+ and 4 with XUL we had released a product. Now at my new job we have done almost the same exact thing, but in the web space. We started down the path of trying to use Java, spending months on SOAP interfaces that ulitmately didn’t meet the product requirements to in a very short time 6 months, standing up an entire sweet of applications using Ruby and Javscript. I guess what I’m trying to say is don’t kill yourself getting Gtk+ working in windows, it won’t be easy… If windows is your target, try something windows focused. For cross platform, I’d say either go web based or go XulRunner… Anyways, just my story and my 2 cents. Good Luck!