Why are wxWindows and PangoCairo used together?

Question

I'm probably way out of the loop, but it seems weird to use a native look GUI library and then - if you're not using wxGTK - shoehorn in a text renderer from a different GUI library. What's the deal here?

Answer 1

I think I understand your point. Using GTK (and Pango Cairo) on Windows, by telling wxWidgets to use internally GTK seems duplicating window managers.

It's just a matter of taste. GTK in Windows does call Windows API to do windowing. But some users like the GTK-way for windows, menus, and other controls instead of the native Windows-way, and wxWidgets provides this feature (in addition, of course, of the native usage, keeping native look&feel).

Anyhow, GTK on Linux calls internaly X11 or Wayland for handling windows and menus. Do you also call this "duplicating"?

Answer 2

The question seems to stem from a mistaken assumption, so it's hard to answer it, let me rather explain how things really are instead:

Cairo-based wxGraphicsContext can be optionally used under MSW because this allows to produce exactly the same graphics output under all platforms, which can be important for some kinds of applications. However it is not used by default, you need to explicitly request it, and if you don't you'd be using GDI+ or Direct2D, both of which are perfectly native libraries.