Easy cross platform dev

[Witis]

Which is the easiest one at the moment eg CodeBlocks, CodeLite, U++ etc?

[CommonTater]

Java.

[User Name:]

Do you mean IDE? CodeBlocks and CodeLite are IDEs. IDEs don't have an influence on the cross platform-ness of your code.

If you want a library that supports a lot of platforms, then I recommend QT.

[Witis]

I am hoping to make cross platform apps which include guis. The compiler should handle the cross platformness of the executables created. As I understand it codeblocks, and codelite include compilers as does U++ meaning they are cross platform frameworks which center around an ide. Not sure about Qt aren't they owned by that finnish phone company Nokia?

CommonTater mentioned Java, so I might include the runtime revolution live code platform which is said to be significantly faster than any c++ cross platform development.

[Mario F.]

For C++, the most cross-platform solution for GUI development will perhaps be described as:

- WxWidgets, for the GUI framework
- GCC for compiler collection
- Any IDE supporting GCC

This setup gives you the ability to code for Windows, Linux, MacOS and many Unix flavors, with full support for the GUI native widgets. Necessarily, if you avoid compiler extensions, you can pretty much choose any compiler since your code will compile across your target platforms. However GCC ubiquity makes it an excellent candidate for cross compiling, since you can take advantage of these extensions and still guarantee cross-compilation.

[User Name:]

Yeah. Qt is owned by Nokia, but they offer it under the LGPL license. You can create proprietary apps with it.

It has a good GUI library, and you can use it alone, if you want. But, it also has a bunch of other libraries. For example, it has a cross platform thread library.

I second Mario on the GCC recommendation. There's a GCC target for almost anything.

[Mario F.]

I didn't know Nokia made changes to the licensing schema of Qt. That indeed makes it a much more attractive option now.

One of the advantages Qt has over WxWidgets for C++ programmers, is that it allows full use of the STL containers. WxWidgets uses its own template classes as part of their portability strategy and hooks its functional classes to these implementations. They are by no means, bad implementations of traditional STL classes. But they do remove from the programmer optimum access to the STL. For you to use STL with WxWidgets, you'll eventually need to cast and this is obviously disadvantageous. Qt, if I'm not mistaken, allows both use of the STL and its own container classes, whichever fits your needs.

This is been one of the few gripes I had with WxWidgets over the years (that and the macro-based event handler). Seeing that Qt licensing has changed to a less abusive schema, it becomes a very interesting option indeed that makes me not so willing to suggest WxWidgets over Qt, as I've always done in the past.

One note also the fact there is going to be significant changes as Qt integration with Gnome is becoming a primary development target of this framework. The recent decision to include Qt on the next release of Ubuntu along with the desire to develop solid Gnome bindings for Qt, sure indicates that Qt ubiquity in the Linux platform may become a reality (...if they don't take 10 years to make it viable, as sometimes seems to be the case with linux development)