GTK+ 3.8.0 released [LWN.net]

GTK+ 3.8.0 released

Posted Mar 28, 2013 2:27 UTC (Thu) by tetley80 (guest, #88691)
In reply to: GTK+ 3.8.0 released by HelloWorld
Parent article: GTK+ 3.8.0 released

It isn't quite as simple. GObject offers quite a few things that the C++ object model doesn't: signals, introspection and an all-encompassing type hierarchy (GType/GValue) that, unlike the C++ object model, includes primitive types. Of course it's a horrible pain to use all that from C, but that's why Vala exists.

On a related note, there seems to be a decent C++ wrapper for GTK+, called gtkmm (which also has signals).

Does anybody have experience with it? How does it compare to using Vala, or Qt ?

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GTK+ 3.8.0 released

Posted Mar 28, 2013 4:43 UTC (Thu) by talisein (subscriber, #31829) [Link]

I've made a few toy apps with it. It works very well in my experience. Where Glib or Gtk give something like a GList, Gtkmm transforms it into a standard library object such as a std::vector, and also accepts standard objects where expected. So its much more of a standard C++ experience than you would get with Qt. If some C library, like say libchamplain, isn't wrapped, you can just access it with C functions; you always have access to the underlying C GObject. You can also directly subclass Glib::Object and give it properties and such.

I can't really say how it compares to Vala, other than I suspect it is more straightforward to use a non-GObject C or C++ library in Gtkmm than it is with Vala.