IUP Portable User Interface

IUP Portable User Interface: Cross-Platform GUI Library

IUP is a portable GUI library written in C that provides controls like buttons, lists, and text fields. It aims to enable writing GUI apps that work across Windows, macOS, Linux and other platforms.

What is IUP Portable User Interface?

IUP, which stands for Portable User Interface, is an open source graphical user interface (GUI) library written in the C programming language. It provides a set of portable widgets like buttons, lists, text fields, frames and dialogs that are designed to work across multiple operating systems including Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD and others.

A key goal of IUP is to enable C/C++ developers to create cross-platform GUI applications easily by providing an API and set of visual controls that abstract away the underlying native GUI toolkits like Windows Forms, Cocoa, GTK+, etc. This allows the same GUI code to be compiled on different platforms with minimal changes.

Some key capabilities and highlights of IUP:

• Lightweight, fast and native look and feel
• Supports Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD
• Written in portable ANSI C with bindings for Lua, .NET, Python and more
• Open source (MIT license) developed by Tecgraf laboratory in Brazil
• IUP controls are platform independent - dialogs, menus and controls are implemented on top of native toolkit
• Uses a high-level, callback-based API for event handling
• Comes with additional GUI libraries like CD for graphics/canvas, IM for image handling

While not as full-featured as Qt or wxWidgets, IUP excels in portability and provides a compact yet powerful set of GUI capabilities. It is used by many open source scientific computing tools like SciLab as well as companies for writing custom cross-platform apps.

IUP Portable User Interface Features

Official Links