wxWidgets is an open source C++ framework allowing to write cross-platform GUI applications with native look and feel in C++ and other languages.
wxWidgets was originally developed by Julian Smart at the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute, University of Edinburgh, for internal use, and was first made publicly available in 1992, with a vastly improved version 2 released in 1999. The last major version of the library is 3 and was released in 2013. Currently wxWidgets is developed and maintained by Julian Smart, Vadim Zeitlin, Stefan Csomor, Robert Roebling, Vaclav Slavik and many others.
More information about wxWidgets is available on its web site at https://www.wxwidgets.org.
Compared to the other similar libraries, wxWidgets is:
wxWidgets provides a simple, easy to learn, yet very rich API, while also proposing a simple way to define application UI in the external XML files. It is also mature and stable, and the applications written using wxWidgets 2.0 pre-releases almost 20 years ago can still be built today with wxWidgets 3 almost unchanged. wxWidgets has a large, active and friendly community of people, including both the users and developers of the library. It is also available now for more than a dozen other languages, including Python, Perl, Ruby, Lua, Haskell, D, Erlang, PHP, in addition to C++.
It is impossible to sum up everything included in wxWidgets in a few paragraphs, but here are some of the benefits:
wxWidgets first-tier "ports", ie implementations of wxWidgets API, are:
Other platforms (e.g. iOS - with a minimum requirement of iOS 13), compilers (Sun CC, HP-UX aCC, IBM xlC or SGI mipsPro under Unix) and ports (wxQT, wxGTK1, wxX11, wxDFB...) are also supported but to a lesser extent. Please see the platform details page for more information.
There are no CPU speed requirements but the faster (and more) CPU(s) you have, the faster the library will compile. You do need to have enough RAM, especially under Windows platforms, to avoid running out of memory during link phase. Depending on the compiler used, you may need at least 4GB to be able to link. Under all platforms it's recommended to have large amounts of free hard disk space. The exact amount needed depends on the port, compiler and build configurations but at least 1GB and possibly more is required.
The download links can be found at https://www.wxwidgets.org/downloads/. Additionally, the latest version can always be retrieved from our version control system using Git (https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets).
The latest version of wxWidgets documentation that you are reading is available online at https://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/ and please also see https://wiki.wxwidgets.org/ for user-contributed contents.
And if you have any questions, you can join wxWidgets community using
wxwidgets
tag on Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/wxwidgets