wxWidgets was developed to provide a cheap and flexible way to maximize investment in GUI application development.
As open source software, wxWidgets has benefited from comments, ideas, bug fixes, enhancements and the sheer enthusiasm of users.

This gives wxWidgets a certain advantage over its commercial competitors (and over free libraries without an independent development team), plus a robustness against the transience of one individual or company.

This openness and availability of source code is especially important when the future of thousands of lines of application code may depend upon the longevity of the underlying class library.

Requirements:

- A 32-bit or 64-bit PC running MS Windows.

- A Windows compiler: MS Visual C++ (embedded Visual C++ for wxWinCE port), Borland C++, Watcom C++, Cygwin, MinGW, Metrowerks CodeWarrior, Digital Mars C++. See install.txt for details about compiler version supported.

- Almost any C++ compiler, including GNU C++ and many Unix vendors compilers such as Sun CC, HP-UX aCC or SGI mipsPro.

- Almost any Unix workstation, and one of: GTK+ 2.4 or higher (GTK+ 1.2.10 may still be supported but wxGTK1 port is not maintained any longer and lacks many features of wxGTK2), Motif 1.2 or higher or Lesstif. If using the wxX11 port, no such widget set is required.

- A PowerPC or Intel Mac running Mac OS X 10.4 or higher

- The Apple Developer Tools (eg. GNU C++).