Which is the best compiler to use with wxWidgets?
It’s partly a matter of taste, but some people prefer Visual C++ since the debugger is very good, it’s very stable, the documentation is extensive, and it generates small executables. Since project files are plain text, it’s easy for me to generate appropriate project files for wxWidgets samples. Borland C++ is fine – and very fast – but it’s hard (impossible?) to use the debugger without using project files, and the debugger is nowhere near up to VC++’s quality. The IDE isn’t great. C++Builder’s power isn’t really used with wxWidgets since it needs integration with its own class library (VCL). For wxWidgets, I’ve only used it with makefiles, in which case it’s almost identical to BC++ 5.0 (the same makefiles can be used). You can’t beat Cygwin’s price (free), and you can debug adequately using gdb. However, it’s quite slow to compile since it does not use precompiled headers. CodeWarrior is cross-platform – you can debug and generate Windows executables from a Mac, but not the other w
