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My friend and I are developing a C software, he's developing it on Windows, I'm contributing and I use Xubuntu. As far as I know, Qt supports C++ and not C, and as far as I know GTK sucks on Windows, and I heard horror stories of people developing GTK software on Windows. I'm looking for:

  • A cross-platform C GUI (Windows, Linux and Mac, 32 bit and 64 bit)
  • Free and open source, I do not want to worry about licensing
  • Maintained
  • Modern looking
  • Lightweight
  • Easy to learn, I want to learn it quickly
  • Well documented, and has sample applications (examples)
  • Support team or forums with active members or active IRC channel
  • Big bonus if I don't have to download an SDK in order to use a GUI library, all I want is to create some windows with few buttons.
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  • 1. If you know C, what is wrong with C++? 2. You probably won't find something better than Qt with the features you are looking for.
    – Cornelius
    May 6, 2014 at 12:57
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    @Cornelius i know c++ too, it's just my partner in the project, he's a retired programmer, spent years doing C and would like to use the language he knows best, he doesn't know C++ and would like to do it in C if possible
    – Lynob
    May 6, 2014 at 13:05
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    If he knows C then he already knows a lot about C++. Here are the main differences cprogramming.com/tutorial/c-vs-c++.html
    – Cornelius
    May 6, 2014 at 13:08
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    @Cornelius I sent him the link lets see if that's enough to convince him, but still the question stands, it will be nice if there's such gui
    – Lynob
    May 6, 2014 at 13:59
  • Also send him this link en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
    – Cornelius
    May 6, 2014 at 14:01

4 Answers 4

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9

If you can accept HTML5/JS as GUI then take a look at the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF):

https://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/

The base CEF framework includes support for the C and C++ programming languages.

CEF supports javascript bindings and callbacks, so you can communicate asynchronously both ways between C <> JS.

Here is an example on how to use CEF C API (a github project of mine): https://github.com/CzarekTomczak/cefcapi

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  • Spotify uses this for example
    – Gourneau
    May 13, 2014 at 0:03
11

It is worth taking a look at wxWidgets - it is a cross platform GUI library written in C++ but it can be used from C and also has bindings for python, ruby, perl and others.

  • Cross Platform - Yes Windows/Linux/OS-X/Others - 64 & 32 bit.
  • Free & Open Source - Yes and with a permissive, (LGPL compatible), licence.
  • Maintained - Actively developed and maintained as it has been since 1992.
  • Modern Looking - Actually wxWidgets looks native on most platforms because where possibly it acts as a wrapper arround the native widgets so on XP it looks XP on Win 7 it looks Win 7, etc.
  • Lightweight - Very for the reason above.
  • Easy to learn - Lots of documentation, examples, demos and online resources.
  • Well documented and examples - see the line above.
  • Support team - Very active forums and mailing list, including the main authors.
  • Don't need and SDK - Yes you use your existing development tool chain to build from source or you can download binary distributions for:
    • Windows as wxMSW DLLs for the selected compilers:
      • Visual C++ 2008-2013
      • TDM-GCC 4.7 and 4.8
    • Ubuntu / Debian Packages
    • Fedora / openSUSE Packages
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  • 1
    I know that another answer has already been accepted for this but still feel it is worth a mention.
    – Steve Barnes
    Jan 24, 2015 at 16:46
0

Also :

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  • This is just a list of links, can you detail what they are, main features and the like? Is there any one you can recommend?
    – Alejandro
    May 7, 2022 at 15:20
0

You can try NAppGUI. www.nappgui.com

Uses ANSI C, its open source and connect with core technologies in each platform (Win32, Cocoa, GTK3)

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