Chapter 22. Tips For Writing GTK Applications

This section is simply a gathering of wisdom, general style guidelines and hints to creating good GTK applications. Currently this section is very short, but I hope it will get longer in future editions of this tutorial.

Use GNU autoconf and automake! They are your friends :) Automake examines C files, determines how they depend on each other, and generates a Makefile so the files can be compiled in the correct order. Autoconf permits automatic configuration of software installation, handling a large number of system quirks to increase portability. I am planning to make a quick intro on them here.

When writing C code, use only C comments (beginning with "/*" and ending with "*/"), and don't use C++-style comments ("//"). Although many C compilers understand C++ comments, others don't, and the ANSI C standard does not require that C++-style comments be processed as comments.