GTK Programming: C or C++

stefanwilkens · 2009-10-03 13:13:24

Through something of a community race project between myself and some friends, we have set ourselves a goal. This being to learn a set of multi platform GUI programming skills. The end result will be an assignment given to us by a professor at my university.

I've chosen to go with GTK, due to my love for gnome.

Now knowling fairly little about C / C++ and GTK, I will be starting from base. Though I'm capable of the basics such as bash, visual .net and the likes, I expect I'll have to start from scratch here.

Now from what I know, GTK is C... But has bindings for C++. Which should I become proficient in before I move on with GTK tutorials?

Allan · 2009-10-03 13:20:13

I have not done a lot of GTK programming, but I prefer the C++ bindings.

bernarcher · 2009-10-03 13:24:19

You could as well go for C and Gtk for the beginning. That way the learning curve is not so steep.

Once you've mastered this step it is fairly easy to advance to GtkMM (provided you feel provicient enough in C++ then). It will ease object-oriented programming the GUI a lot.

Lich · 2009-10-03 13:49:02

Yep, definatly C + GTK. If the language was not imposed, the fastest way to do GTK would still be Python though

stefanwilkens · 2009-10-03 15:00:58

so it seems to come down to user preference

I will be ordering:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Prog … %28book%29

thanks for the clarification guys.

skottish · 2009-10-03 15:51:23

You can always look into wxWidgets. Then you not only have GTK2 on any platform that supports wxGTK, you can also have native Windows and Mac controls.

bernarcher · 2009-10-03 16:01:59

K&R is the proper way to start learning C.

Next step will be to become proficient with a suiting development environment. You can go on for a while using an editor of your choice and the hints from e.g. the GTK+ 2.0 Tutorial. But once your applications become more complex you will definitely need more advanced tools.

At least you should have cursory look at info make, info autoconf, and there esp. this chapter info "(autoconf)The GNU Build System".

Or you go on and use a dedicated IDE like e.g. Anjuta from the beginning. (Studying those autotools docs would help nontheless.)

Themaister · 2009-10-03 16:02:36

I tried wxWidgets, but had serious problems finding good tutorials that I could spin off from. Any ideas?

C + GTK seems very "clean" and simple. At least the simple Hello World and basic packing of widgets simply made more sense with C-style programming

Last edited by Themaister (2009-10-03 16:04:31)

skottish · 2009-10-03 19:15:35

Themaister wrote:

I tried wxWidgets, but had serious problems finding good tutorials that I could spin off from. Any ideas?

There's a bunch of programs that use wxGTK in the repos. I'd just take a look at the source for those to see what others have done.

Anikom15 · 2009-10-03 19:18:58

What about SDL?

scj · 2009-10-03 19:46:03

Anikom15 wrote:

What about SDL?

That would cover the G, not the UI.

SiC · 2009-10-05 20:10:35

What about Python? Python has good GTK bindings, and it's quite a nice language, a lot of people on these forums seem to like it,... Just a thought.

dalingrin · 2009-10-06 02:07:51

stefanwilkens wrote:

Through something of a community race project between myself and some friends, we have set ourselves a goal. This being to learn a set of multi platform GUI programming skills. The end result will be an assignment given to us by a professor at my university.
I've chosen to go with GTK, due to my love for gnome.
Now knowling fairly little about C / C++ and GTK, I will be starting from base. Though I'm capable of the basics such as bash, visual .net and the likes, I expect I'll have to start from scratch here.
Now from what I know, GTK is C... But has bindings for C++. Which should I become proficient in before I move on with GTK tutorials?

This is definitely personal preference.

For me, I prefer using C++ for gui programming but, I started out with with object-oriented programming early on. If you don't have much object-oriented programming experience I suggest start out with C and GTK. Though, unless you specifically want to learn a "lower" level language, I would suggest Python and PyGTK. After that it will probably be easier to learn something lower level.
I'll warn you, if you are coming form bash and visual basic then C/C++ will be quite a shock. Python will be a good intermediary.

davehome · 2009-10-06 06:35:40

I've played with Vala a little bit, and it's extremely awesome in many ways.

Vala is a new programming language that aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME developers without imposing any additional runtime requirements and without using a different ABI compared to applications and libraries written in C.
[...]
valac, the Vala compiler, is a self-hosting compiler that translates Vala source code into C source and header files. It uses the GObject type system to create classes and interfaces declared in the Vala source code.
The syntax of Vala is similar to C#, modified to better fit the GObject type system.

arch packages:

# yaourt -Ss vala

First post, btw; and, I've been using Arch since:

# ls -alh /
total 77K
drwxr-xr-x  20 root root 4.0K 2009-09-30 11:33 .
[...]

Arch Linux

#1 2009-10-03 13:13:24

GTK Programming: C or C++

#2 2009-10-03 13:20:13

Re: GTK Programming: C or C++

#3 2009-10-03 13:24:19

Re: GTK Programming: C or C++

#4 2009-10-03 13:49:02

Re: GTK Programming: C or C++

#5 2009-10-03 15:00:58

Re: GTK Programming: C or C++

#6 2009-10-03 15:51:23

Re: GTK Programming: C or C++

#7 2009-10-03 16:01:59

Re: GTK Programming: C or C++

#8 2009-10-03 16:02:36

Re: GTK Programming: C or C++

#9 2009-10-03 19:15:35

Re: GTK Programming: C or C++

#10 2009-10-03 19:18:58

Re: GTK Programming: C or C++

#11 2009-10-03 19:46:03

Re: GTK Programming: C or C++

#12 2009-10-05 20:10:35

Re: GTK Programming: C or C++

#13 2009-10-06 02:07:51

Re: GTK Programming: C or C++

#14 2009-10-06 06:35:40

Re: GTK Programming: C or C++

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