Best GUI for interfacing with C/C++ libraries?

[cKGunslinger]

I have a lot of custom cross-platform C and C++ libraries that perform some image generation and manipulation. Currently, I have a small exe that just dumps the resultant images to an image buffer on a dedicated display card and monitor for viewing.

The code is fast enough that I can generate images at ~60Hz, giving me essentially full-motion video on that display. Works well in Windows and Linux.

If I wanted to spiff this code up and display these images inside a Window on the host OS (rather than requiring separate display hardware), maybe with some GUI controls (widgets/radio buttons/etc) to set the C libraries' function parameters, what are my fast options?

A dedicated toolkit, like Qt or GTK just seems like overkill. I like the idea of something like Electron, but it seems I'd have to create extensive wrappers around my libraries for this to work? This seems true for a lot of non-C options (Java Swing, etc.)

I'm not a GUI programmer (obviously,) so I'm not even sure where to start looking. I assume "Cross-platform GUI w/ C bindings?"

 

[cKGunslinger]

I'm also wondering if something like SDL2 would be a worthwhile investment? It has OpenGL support and user inputs, which could be nice.

But, back to first-order - I don't want to over-complicate this.

Basically, I want:

• Start the app
• Auto-open a resizable, OS-native window
  • Have a few setting widgets in this window that a user can tick/edit
  • Have a large display area for images to load and display in the window
• Have a menu item/button for "Start"
  • This calls a function in my C library that passes in some settings, kicks off some threads, and returns a pointer to an image buffer
• Have this app (in a continuous loop) read that pointer to an image buffer, load it, and display it in the window
  • Meanwhile, my C library is continuously updating the contents in that image buffer
• The end

 

[Hail The Brain Slug]

Sounds like something Dear IMGUI would be good for.

 

[cKGunslinger]

Sounds like something Dear IMGUI would be good for.

Thanks. That's in my list to look at today.

 

[MajinCry]

A bit late, but there is Lazarus. It uses Pascal, and it's got a cross-platform GUI that uses native controls across all platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Mac.

 

[cKGunslinger]

Sounds like something Dear IMGUI would be good for.

It turns out, Dear IMGUI was the perfect solution, fyi. Only got around to using it the last few weeks (was using just SDL after this post), but the combo of SDL2 + IMGUI + OpenGL is silky smooth and super simple to work with.

Highly recommend for quick-n-dirty GUI C apps.