GUI libs

[Gerhard Haering]

Thomas Heller wrote:
> Gerhard Haering <gh at ghaering.de> writes:
>>Mark Nenadov wrote:
>>
>>>Alessio Pace wrote:
>>>
>>
>>>>Hi, I'd like to make a GUI for a program written in python, meant to run
>>>>on mac, win and linux: which is the preferable solution? I saw around
>>>>tkinter, wxpython and pyqt....
>>>
>>>I'd strongly recommend wxPython. wxPython is quite a rich GUI
>>>library and I have found it to be more advanced/modern/feature-rich
>>>than tkinter.
>>
>>
>>You'll get a Python interface with the error behaviour of the wrapped
>>C++ library. The default is to crash. In my limited experience, anyway.
> 
> Not for me, but I can only speak for Windows.

On Windows, try this:

C:\>python
Python 2.2.2 (#37, Oct 14 2002, 17:02:34) [MSC 32 bit (Intel)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
 >>> from wxPython.wx import *
 >>> f = wxFrame(NULL, 1, "foo")
 >>> f.Show()

This will segfault Python. IIRC, this was what I did in my very first 
exploration of wxPython.

I believe the reason of this crash is that the wxWindows main loop isn't 
initialized, yet. What I've done may be not very clever, but in my 
opinion, a Python app should *never* crash. The whole point of me using 
a highly dynamic language like Python is that it will give me exceptions.

The high likelyhood of a wxPython crashing my Python interpreter pretty 
much kills the idea of interactively epxloring the framework for me. 
Which might not be very useful for a GUI framework, but it's the way I 
usually start learning a new Python library.

All this aside, I still prefer wxPython over the alternatives.

-- Gerhard