forked from buzzert/smartbar
36 lines
3.0 KiB
HTML
36 lines
3.0 KiB
HTML
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<link rel="stylesheet" href="assets/css/gtkapplang.css" />
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<div id="body" class="page-base">
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<div id="article-header">
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<div>
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<img id="gtk-logo" src="assets/img/logo-gtk.png" />
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</div>
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<div>
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<h1>Linux GTK Apps</h1>
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<h2>A Language Comparison</h2>
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<h3>by P. Michael Cho</h3>
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</div>
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</div>
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<div id="article-body">
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<p><span class="first-word">A</span> famous hacker once said, "Linux is only free if your time has no value." Well, anyone who knows me knows that my time is about as worthless as a bag of salt. Thus, I really had nothing to lose when I decided to ditch the glitzy, glamorous commercial OS'es and go all-in on Linux this year.</p>
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<p>It's really not that bad in 2025. Maybe it really is the <em>Year of the Linux Desktop.</em> A lot of stuff just works out of the box. You don't have to waste a whole weekend getting sound to work in YouTube videos. X11 isn't really a thing anymore, so fiddling with ancient hieroglyphic <strong>Xorg config files</strong> is no longer required just to get your anime girlfriend wallpaper desktop to show up on the screen.</p>
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<p>Emboldened with a new sense of optimism for the Linux desktop, I decided to try writing a few <strong>native apps</strong> to see what the developer ecosystem is like. <strong>GTK,</strong> formerly known as the <strong>GIMP ToolKit,</strong> appears to be the de-facto widget toolkit for creating native GUI apps on Linux, so I decided to learn and explore how to develop apps using this toolkit.</p>
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<p>The first problem I encountered was a severe sense of language paralysis. There are many, many choices of programming languages when developing GTK apps, which isn't necessarily a good thing. Apple doesn't always do everything right, but upholding Swift as the one true language for developing macOS and iOS apps reduces a lot of fragmentation for developers. A walled garden keeps the snakes out! Nevertheless, I decided to try and write a few small apps in a variety of different languages to see which one feels the best.</p>
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<h4>C (Rating: B-)</h4>
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<p>The first language I decided to try is an oldie-but-goodie. Just plain ol' C. Linux guys really like C, and really hate pretty much every other language, and the GTK toolkit itself is implemented in C, so it seemed like a good first choice.</p>
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<p>One cool thing about GTK is that it is based on runtime library called <strong>GLib,</strong> which implements a bunch of object-oriented design patterns in C. It defines an object model, lifetime semantics, and a bunch of commonly used data structures that you can use in your app. Object-oriented programming is definitely out of style nowadays but I still think it is a solid paradigm for developing user interfaces. For example, it makes sense conceptually for all widgets to inherit from a base class that defines things like screen geometry and parent-child relationships.</p>
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<p>My first couple of hours with C were glorious. The code was just falling out of my hands. The language is so simple, it's nearly impossible to waste any time on design.</p>
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</div>
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</div>
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