There's a new release of wxWidgets, the open source cross-platform C++ framework for writing advanced GUI applications using native controls. The new release comes almost nine years after the beginning of the last wxWidgets stable release series.

wxWidgets can be used to write native-looking GUI applications for all the major desktop platforms and also helps with abstracting the differences in the non-GUI aspects between them. It is free for the use in both open source and commercial applications, comes with the full, easy to read and modify, source and extensive documentation and a collection of more than a hundred examples.

The improvements to the new version start with support for new compilers (up to MSVS 2022, g++ 12, clang 14) with a simpler way of using wxWidgets from MSVS and a new CMake build system.

MacOS users get support for ARM hardware and MacOS versions up to 13, along with the option of using native dark mode.

More generally, there's now high DPI support with a new API based on wxBitmapBundle, The support includes per-monitor DPI and dynamic DPI changes.

There's a long list of new features in the new version, starting with HTTPS and HTTP/2 support with wxWebRequest. You can freeze rows or columns in wxGrid, and make use of non-integer font sizes and arbitrary font weights in wxFont.

The  wxGraphicsContext widget now supports fractional pen widths, and  wxStaticBox allows the use of in arbitrary label windows. There's a new edge-based wxWebView implementation, and support for using native spell-checking in wxTextCtrl. A number of new classes have also been added, along with many new features in the existing classes.

The new release also adds better compile-time safety with the addition of the ability to disable dangerous implicit conversions between wxString and char* strings.

The third party libraries bundled with the library have all been updated to the latest versions, including all the security fixes and support for WebKit 2 and GStreamer 1.7 under Unix. There's better Wayland support in wxGTK, though the developers say it still could be improved. OpenGL support has also been revamped to better match the requirements of modern OpenGL.  Support for C++ 11 has been improved, and wxWidgets can now be built using C++20 compilers. Finally, there's a new experimental wxQt port.

wxWidgets is available now.

More Information

wxWidgets on GitHub

wxWidgets Website

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