The Desktop GUI development space has been owned by Borland and Microsoft pretty much since that space existed. The free software world has started to catch up though. Four packages have combined to make an excellent development environment for GUI applications.

The first is MinGW, a Win32 port of the gcc compiler that dominates the UNIX world. Unlike the Cygwin tools, MinGW builds a native application that doesn't require any compatibility libraries like Cygwin does. Although it lags behind the main gcc distribution, it's quite well supported by distributed open source software packages, making it easy to build software using common open libraries.

The next is wxWidgets, a cross-platform GUI library that is easy to use and creates applications with native widgets. That means that on UNIX the application looks like any other GTK+ application, and on Windows it looks like a Windows application. It is well supported, and ships with a large number of examples so that you can see how to use the library.

Code::Blocks is an IDE that uses wxWidgets and most common C and C++ compilers, including MinGW. Code::Blocks was designed to be cross-platform, so it takes care of most of the issues involved with cross platform builds, including generating the proper build sequences for applications rather than relying on Makefiles. It also integrates well with wxWidgets, so that it will work out the right paths and libraries based on your actual installed wxWidgets.

wxFormBuilder is the final player is this quartet. It is a RAD GUI designer for wxWidgets. Like the GUI designers from Borland, it is very easy to drop controls on the form and hook them up to actions in code. It's also very easy to extend with new components, without requiring that the component be somehow installed or registered with the GUI tool. That has always been a serious problem with Borland's development model, and a problem that I am very happy to see solved. It also integrates well with Code::Blocks.

This doesn't mean that people are going to be throwing out their copy of Delphi or Visual Basic. But it does mean that when I want to write a nice looking GUI program, I've got a new and very excellent tool handy. Having written major applications in Delphi and Visual Basic in the past, I know that they can do very nice things. I also know that they have a lot of limitations. Using C++ and these tools I get the ease of use I enjoy with Delphi, but have the power of C++ handy. For me, a dedicated C++ developer, this is a very happy situation.