WxWidgets Review

Now that I've had a chance to settle down and not work on the client for a couple of weeks, I'm probably in the right frame of mind to write a proper review of wxWidgets.

First off, wxWidgets is a multi-platform GUI toolkit. It's been used to build a variety of applications, including the current version of the Alter Aeon Mud client. It works on a bunch of different platforms, including Linux, Windows, Mac, and a handful of less popular operating systems. I've used it to build the most recent versions of the Alter Aeon Mud Client, a standalone executable designed for the players of Alter Aeon. It has a graphical automap and basic colored-text console facilities.

In the case of standard dialogs and standard types of objects, it works quickly and well. Everything always looks 'as it should' for the platform it's on. Unfortunately, things work less well for even slightly more complicated objects.

Take for example the standard wxTextCtrl object. This uses what's known as a 'native' library - the guts of this object are based on the system libraries where it's built. On Windows it uses one of the standard text window DLLs, while under Linux it can use GTK or other libraries. Because of differences between these system libraries, the behavior of the wxTextCtrl on different platforms is vastly different.

Scrolling may or may not work depending on the platform; URLs, if enabled, may or may not display in Windows depending on the version and service pack level. Performance varies; disabling certain features may break window formatting, and Append may insert arbitrary line feeds after ever call. When editing text, attempts to move the cursor past the end of the text triggers a system beep at full volume. The list goes on, and not all of these are fixable without editing wxWidgets itself.

One recommended solution for these kinds of problems is to use the wxRichTextEdit class. This is a ground-up reimplementation of the text window, with an interface similar to the wxTextEdit class but far more comprehensive. This class actually works pretty well, and it's consistent across platforms as you'd expect.

The only problem is that it's slow. Dog slow. A dog with no legs slow. Using it as a text console display becomes almost useless beyond a few thousand lines of text. And that was pretty much the whole point of what I wanted to do.

Fortunately, there's another solution: the Scalia wxStyledTextEdit class, which is an add-on module from another open source project. This class is designed to do fairly complex text formatting and styling, including multiple styles simultaneously and syntax highlighting. I don't actually need most of that stuff, but I figured I'd give it a try as well.

The downside of this class is that the interface to make it work is quite complex. It's a heavyweight class, designed for very complicated types of things. It's got nearly everything you could possibly need - and some things you don't, including implementation bugs. Quite frankly, I never got to testing the performance of this class, simply because I could never figure out how to change the background color of the window. It's not like I didn't try.

As a last resort, the drawing primitives in wxWidgets are actually pretty good. In approximately one week, I was able to construct my own text window class with the features and performance that I required for this application. Remember that if you have a lot of trouble with one particular module, getting out a wxDC and building your own is always a viable option, and if it doesn't work it's no-one's fault but your own.

Compared with my experience with QT, there is absolutely no comparison: QT has better documentation, better cross platform support, fewer cross platform bugs, better performance, and a more consistent design. Unfortunately, QT is LGPL, requiring an installer for binary applications, and the QT libraries are upwards of 50 MB in most builds. So on that count, wxWidgets wins: it makes drastically smaller and easy to work with executables.

Score for wxWidgets: 5/10

It does most of what it's supposed to do, but don't use it for anything important.