Moving from MFC to GTK – Whats involved?

[gommtu]

We presently have 500,000 lines of C++ code, of which about 75,000 lines use Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) to provide the human interface (GUI). We especially use the multi-document classes of MFC and the Tree display (using a rich set of the features). We want to move to a more portable, more modern, and better documented GUI that we can integrate with the rest of our code.

Code management is not a requirement.

By portable we seek ports to Android, Apple, and Unix environments - not just ports to lots of Microsoft environments.

We are also looking for PDF file support in this kind of environment.

We are also looking for a different debugging environment. Currently, we use Visual Studio 2010. We can stay with this IF the new GUI can be debugged in Visual Studio 2010. We especially don't want to have to use a lot of separate programs, rather we want an integrated development and support environment.

Either or both of these tools must have ongoing bug fixing and we have to be able to know that any new tools will work on our application BEFORE we pay big bucks for them. For the right tools after demonstrating that they work, big bucks is OK.

Are there any potential problems in switching from MFC to GTK? Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[Richard Robertson]

It's worth noting that cross compiling in Visual Studio isn't as straightforward as it is by command line tools because Visual Studio targets Microsoft environments. As far as debugging goes, no changes will be needed by switching from MFC to GTK because neither of those have anything to do with the debugger. They are simply the mechanism used to create user interfaces.

And just my curiosity, but why did you write "human interface" instead of "user interface"? Are you implying that you specifically don't want non-humans to use it? Or that you are looking for something that can't be automated?