Comment by Klonoar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Klonoar | Hacker News Reader

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I recently-ish upgraded an app's (Slippi) wxWidgets base to 3.1.4, which led me into a somewhat deep dive of wxWidgets since the Dolphin build it was forked from had an "Externals" version that was somewhat of a custom setup. Needless to say I have a renewed appreciation for the amount of work that went into (and still goes into) wxWidgets. It's just absurd how well it covers the "big 3" desktop environments.

I think it probably gets a bad rep when compared to "modern" UI development frameworks, however this thing is still trucking along all these years later. I'm not sure I'll need to touch 3.1.5, but it's just really cool to see it still being worked on.

I think the biggest thing the project needs though though is... documentation. Or maybe it has it, but needs some serious SEO work to make it better accessible? So much of my time was spent trying to figure out what specific feature flags meant, whether they were still valid, and so on. I've done Cocoa development for years, so I'm used to outdated/old documentation, but with wxWidgets it just felt... harder to find the right stuff. Maybe because the userbase is smaller in comparison?

FWIW updating from 3.1.4 to 3.1.5 (and then to 3.2.0) should be pretty seamless.

The documentation does need work, but it's hard to find people volunteering to do it (although a few people do contribute to the docs too and this is something that is always very much appreciated). Any concrete suggestions for improvements are welcome as reports on https://trac.wxwidgets.org/newticket and, as you might have already realized by now, PRs to the docs on https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/pulls are even more so.

Finally, asking questions (on the forum, users mailing list or SO) seems to work pretty well for most people.

Cool to know re: 3.1.5, but I don't think I'll need to dig into it as Dolphin upstream moved to Qt, and eventually, hopefully, Slippi just mirrors that.

And yeah, I hear you on the people issue... open source is sometimes a thankless job. Overall though, great job on wxWidgets so far - I really do think it's an underappreciated project.

I find the documentation fairly easy to follow and well written. I leave the class index open in a web browser, pinned.

The great thing is you can just look at the source if there's any confusion. One issue is the mildly broken nature of the macOS version (odd bugs now and then) but that's because Apple keeps changing things. It is significantly better than it was 5 years ago!

Try reading other documentation like MFC and you'll appreciate the wxWidgets documentation...

Eeeehhh I'm gonna disagree - most open source macOS projects have those bugs because it lacks the resources/dev-power to keep up. Windows and Linux in comparison tend to have much more in the way of developers willing to contribute.

Cocoa/AppKit rarely change, and it's often one of the bigger complaints with it. Big Sur is probably the most radical version change set in years, but to say Apple "keeps changing things" for Cocoa/AppKit is not really correct.

Also, if it's not clear, I _do_ read other documentation. I still think wxWidgets needs work, and one of the devs even admitted as much in their response to me.

What is wrong with https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/mfc/mfc-desktop-applica... or for those that like books, https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Windows-Second-Jeff-Prosi... ?

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