Zap

This is good. But I'm still worried about efficiency. How much overhead are we talking here I mean if it's not noticeable, I'll go for it. Atleast, when I need rapid development.

Game_Ender

When you say manual I hope you have already found this. They have a pretty good forum to. Along with a decent wiki.

About performance, I really can't give you hard numbers. I have only used wxWidgets on Mac and Linux. The speed was acceptable and like other have said the slow down usually comes in the processing your application does, not the actuall interface. Use wxWidgets because it lets you create cross platform native applications.

EDIT: The one thing you have to watch for is the drawing of custom widgets. Just make sure you do thing effciently and you should have any performance problems.

Zap

Yes, I've seen those. I'm looking for an offline help file... (for Windows)

As for performance, I need someone who has tried both the Windows Application Programming Interface, and wxWidgets. I need to see two Apps that do the same thing (in almost the same way, if possible) and compare them side by side. If the overhead is too great, I will only use them for cross platform. BTW, has anyone ever programmed for the Mac API?

Game_Ender

Let me lay it down for you Zan, wxWidgets will be slower, just accept that. Your code will be clearner and more understandable than Win32 api code and it will also be portable. That's the trade off you pay.

If there is something really GUI heavy you have to do in your app create a small Win32 and wxWidgets test program and profile them to compare preformance. It will probably also be a pretty good example of how things are different in wxWidgets than Win32.

When making an application speed should not be first consideration. Create a decent flexible design for you program, code it, profile it and tweak as necesary to get the needed performance. No need to spend so much time worrying about the wxWidgets API slowing you down when its that network bottle neck, or the hard drive access, or that heavy math computation you are doing in the background.

Arevos

Okay... Why bring it up in the first place, then?
Since you already a little about the Win32 API, why not try and implement one of the simpler wxWidgets example programs using the Win32 API. Then you can contrast and compare the two approaches without needing to learn wxWidgets.

Zap

I may just do that

Eoin

Zap, I share your feelings regarding code bloat and large overheads. Personally I found wxWidgets just too big, specificially regarding final executable size. I chose a third option; WTL. It has a clean OOP interface using templates to be size efficient, if your going to develop for Windows I highly recommend it .

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lectricpharaoh

I think you'll find that many of these size increases are flat amounts, not proportional. Thus, if you are writing programs that were previously very small, the size increases may seem disproportionate, but if you are writing larger programs, they are not bad at all. If you're planning on delivering a suite of small applications to the same end user(s), you might want to see if dynamic linking of the libraries will provide a solution; this way, the size increase would not be multiplied unduly.

If you need cross-platform support, it will come at a cost. It might be financial, it might be in code size, it might be in run-time performance, or it might be in development time (likely more than one of these).

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lectricpharaoh

Ahh, thanks; you just reminded me I haven't read least Friday's BOFH. Non-sequitur? Not so much; The Register's slogan is 'biting the hand that feeds IT'.

No, but by referring to the Win32 API as 'API', you effectively called it 'that one API'.
I, too, use an outdated machine. As a student, I don't have an awful lot of free cash to spend on the latest and greatest. Look at the bright side, though: if your code works well on your machine, it should perform quite well on new hardware.
I doubt they made your family homeless. Your family may have sold their home, perhaps under pressure from this company. They may have been renting or leasing, and the owner may have sold it. Either way, it is not as though the company's objective was to deprive your family of their home.

Even if it was, you're ascribing the attributes of that one company to all big companies. This is a variant of the ad hominem logical fallacy. To give an example, imagine I got mugged by a black man. If I then said "I hate black men, because they are muggers", you would probably call me a racist.

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Soulstorm

There's not just one API for the Macintosh OS.

And yes, I have. I have originally gotten involved with Carbon, but not much later, I moved to Cocoa API, and I recently built some useful GUI apps for people that asked me to. What do you want to know?

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