beginners choice: wx or tk?

[Michael Torrie]

On 07/14/2015 08:06 AM, Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2015-07-14, Michael Torrie <torriem at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 07/13/2015 08:42 AM, Grant Edwards wrote:
>>> If it didn't have to run on Windows, I'd pick pygtk over wx.  I've
>>> never tried qt.
>>
>> PyQt is very nice to work with.  In some respects it's not as Pythonic
>> as PyGTK.  It feels a lot like transliterated C++ code, which it is.
>> But it's a powerful toolkit and looks great on all supported platforms.
>> If the licensing terms of PyQt are not to your liking, PySide is fairly
>> close to PyQt (a few quirks that can be worked around), though I'm not
>> sure how much love it's receiving lately.  Like wx, or Gtk, you would
>> have to ship some extra dlls with your project for Windows and OS X.
> 
> Why would you have to ship "extra" libraries for Windows?  Extra
> compared to what?  When I compared bundled apps for Windows using wx
> and Tk, you had to ship more libraries using Tk than you did with wx.
> Maybe that's changed...

You make a good point.  Although Tk is considered part of the standard
Python library (though optional), Tk not only requires some dlls, it
also embeds the tcl language interpreter as well.  So by some measures,
Tk in Python is pretty heavy, though I have no idea what the size it
would add to an application bundle actually is.  I've always thought it
was a bit crazy how when you use Tk, you're actually using the Tcl
language as well, even though you're driving it all from Python.  I
believe there were attempts to separate Tk from Tcl, and allow Perl/Tk
to replace all the Tcl code with Perl code.

Qt weighs in at between 5 and 15 MB of dlls, depending on how much of it
you are using, and 32 or 64-bit.  Gtk weighs in at about 10-15 MB also,
and that's over a lot more little files and directories for things like
image loaders.