suggestions sought for a framework for a quick, dirty, really simple GUI prototype

[Ori Berger]

On 07/18/2012 04:50 AM, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:
> What is important here is speed and painless ramp-up to some fairly low
> level. I want to be up and running as fast as possible with as little
> coding as possible. No need for bells and whistles. No need for long
> term maintenance. It is for a throw away demo/prototype - and yes, I am
> sure it (the GUI part) will be thrown away.
>
> Any suggestions / experiences / war stories / whatever?

I've been using fltk since 1999, with great success. It is remarkably 
simple compared to just about every other framework out there, and it is 
ridiculously fast (but only slightly less capable than Qt). This is the 
toolkit that CinePaint switched to from GTK.

It is "C+-" style - that is, it is C++ as it was usable in the year 
2000: Classes, but no multiple inheritance; no exceptions or rtti used; 
threads supported by virtue of keeping GUI on one thread, and providing 
simple signaling to the GUI thread.

It is "90s" style - that is, there are a lot of globals. Don't diss it 
until you've tried - the code is simpler and faster as a result, and 
nothing is missing; e.g., if you want to draw text in in red with 
helvetica, size 10, you just do:

fl_font(FL_HELVETICA, 10);
fl_color(FL_RED);
fl_draw("text", x, y);

It is very well documented, and comes with tens of simple-to-understand 
yet very useful examples.

If you do take fltk, you want the recently released 1.3 branch (ignore 2.0).