As stated previously, I'm working on a terrain generator with the SFML (more details on that later). But now that the core thingie is running, I'd like to add a GUI to tweak the parameters.

Foolish me. I had no idea what I was getting into.

So. I know we're going to delve into Qt later this year, so I wanted to use Qt. But building under VC2010 sounded like a pain in the - er - back, so I looked elsewhere.

wxWidgets looked rather nice. Bummer, no VC2010 version. But wait, wxPack is a compiled version, with VC2010 compatibility! Well, uh, not quite. It doesn't integrate so linking is really painful, specifying every library by hand with no data on the required ones (and trial and error is really annoying beyond 20 libs). Integration works with the 2008 version though. Which is (completely objectively) less pretty and comfortable, and doesn't highlight matching braces on reading. Using wxWidgets also involves really ugly-looking macros absolutely everywhere. And I dislike having 400 warnings coming from the libs during linking.

Back to Qt then, using QtCreator? I guess. Except no. The installer seems to have messed up and not installed project files. And the package manager refuses to find some component's metadata. So on I go to download the offline version.

Meanwhile (1.4GB takes quite a while to download), I look around for alternatives. I had heard about GTK+ but forgot to investigate. Saw a C++ wrapper called gtkmm. Download. Install. Add properties sheets for VC2010, included in installer. Write some example code. Build. Run. One small warning. Running smoothly. And one small but lovely detail: a "Side Effects" section in the installer, stating the modified environment variables. That's too rare.

Qt wasn't even done downloading.

So I guess I'll stick with gtkmm. No ugly macros, easy install, multiplatform. What more to ask for?

(Edit / Spoiler: easy GL context creation? One cannot have it all... We'll see how it ends.)