wxWidgets is a programmer’s toolkit for writing desktop or mobile applications with graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It’s a framework, in the sense that it does a lot of the housekeeping work and provides default application behavior. The wxWidgets library contains a large number of classes and methods for the programmer to use and customize. Applications typically show windows containing standard controls, possibly drawing specialized images and graphics and responding to input from the mouse, keyboard, or other sources. They may also communicate with other processes or drive other programs. In other words, wxWidgets makes it relatively easy for the programmer to write an application that does all the usual things modern applications do.
While wxWidgets is often labeled a GUI development toolkit, it is in fact much more than that and has features that are useful for many aspects of application development. This has to be the case because all of a wxWidgets application needs to be portable to different platforms, not just the GUI part. wxWidgets provides classes for files and streams, multiple threads, application settings, interprocess communication, online help, database access, and much more.
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