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Is WxWidgets relevant in 2015? Last release was on October 06, 2014, is this project dead? Is there any reason to pick it over Qt?

graywolf
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  • Looking at the [developer blog](http://wxwidgets.blogspot.com/) it looks like there is some active development going on and they are one their way to a 3.0.3 release. – Bowdzone Sep 03 '15 at 09:57
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    It will be dead if there is no releases for many years, and not a 11 month. Qt has 6 month release period - is it dead? – RazrFalcon Sep 03 '15 at 10:09
  • Well, I prefer Qt, but it's true WxWidgets has some differences that make it notable. – Tarod Sep 03 '15 at 10:15
  • Why nobody mentions the pricing... qt seems to require a subscription while wxwidgets is free? – User Sep 23 '17 at 09:30
  • @lxx can I ask where did you get that? Qt is under LGPL, so if dynamic linking is good enough for you, you can use it free of charge..? – graywolf Sep 24 '17 at 02:00
  • @Paladin, unless you have a binary with a lot of DLLs/plugins you shouldn't be using dynamic linking, especially on Windows, where the standard approach is `static linking` in user space. Also Qt still does not provide native L&F on the platforms other than *nix/KDE. And if *nix has GNOME installed the application look will be ugly. wxWidgets rule!!! – Igor Nov 06 '17 at 21:53
  • wxWidgets 3.1.5 was [released](https://www.wxwidgets.org/news/2021/04/wxwidgets-3.1.5-released/) on 2021-04-14. – Pablo H Sep 28 '21 at 16:24

3 Answers3

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Yes, wxWidgets is relevant in 2015 for writing portable desktop applications with native look and feel, nothing much has changed there.Reasons for choosing wx over Qt remain the same as always too, see e.g. this answer. What did change is that in many cases you need to target mobile platforms (where wxWidgets is much less relevant as it only has some support for iOS and still not for anything else) or may choose the HTML+JS approach -- but this is a separate decision.

The project is certainly mature (who wouldn't, after 20+ years), but is not dead at all. You can look at the commit activity to check for yourself. If you think that 11 months since the last release is too long to wait for, you are absolutely free to use the latest Git master (which does have quite a number of improvements) or switch to one of JavaScript frameworks.

Community
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VZ.
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Gladly to informed about latest release wxWidgets, it's now being version 3.1. Seem the guys behind the stage were worked hard to invent and make this library become more mature and provide better feature. wxQt is now being supported, nice...

wxWidgets is worth as our primary GUI framework to work with. Congratulation for all wx developer community.....

Check it: http://wxwidgets.org/news/2016/02/wxwidgets-3.1.0-released/

yasriady
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I do agree with Dr.Vadim, 11 months (now 12 months) is not too long to wait for another recent release. Since it first release 20+ years ago, wxWidgets now is become really mature library and provide you very complete documentation. wxWidgets also makes GUI component look native in the desktop's OS where it appeared... be it windows, linux or mac...

I'm also heavy user of wxWidgets due to it's ability to yields portable application, maturity, complete documentation, updated and licensing scheme reasons. Binary application yields by this library is very small, even for statically linking compare to qt.

For those reasons, developing an application for ARM architecture with limited cpu speed and memory will be satisfied by wxWidgets library.

CMIIW, I believe, future of portable and embedded application will belong to wxWidgets...

This link is my experience to build wx library and application for Raspberry Pi: http://yasriady.blogspot.co.id/2015/10/how-to-build-wxwidgets-for-raspberry-pi.html, and as the result, my application running smooth and happy in Raspbian...

You might try to make a comparison for those reasons as well.... and see if wx will match your expectation....

UPDATED (12-Jan-2016): Ready used and easy installation wxWidgets/Eclipse-IDE/Toolchain cross compiler, please do follow this link: http://yasriady.blogspot.co.id/2016/01/raspberry-pi-toolchain.html

yasriady
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