GTK+ Development for Raspberry Pi

After developing GTK+ applications (to run on Raspberry Pi) for more than 2 months, I found that it's much more productive to do most of the development and preliminary testing on my laptop. Once I'm done with the preliminary tests, I transfer the code to Raspberry Pi for native compilation. Most of the time the code runs without a hitch but in several rare occasions, I did find some minor bugs on my code once the code runs on Raspberry Pi. This is one BUG example:

...
GError *error;

// Function that uses "error" variable here
...

The code above runs just fine on my laptop (x64 Linux), but it terminated the program execution in Raspberry Pi complaining that the error variable is not initialized properly. This is the fix:

...
GError *error = NULL;

// Function that uses "error" variable here
...

Simply initializing the variable to NULL makes everything works as expected :-). There are other minor differences, but from what I have code, I can say that even multithread and multiprocess (running child process) code works just fine in Raspberry Pi when using GTK+v3.X (with the accompanying GLib, etc.). Testing the application on the laptop, most of the time mirrors the behavior of the code on Raspberry Pi.

The reason I'm doing this kind of development is simply time. It takes too much time to compile and test the application on Raspberry Pi. The code-test cycle on my Laptop is far faster and more productive. I hope this is also a consideration for those developing GTK+ application for Raspberry Pi.

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