Why are there no precompiled wxWidgets libraries?

Many people ask why there are no precompiled binaries for wxWidgets, when many other products (such as MFC) come with .lib files ready to use.

wxWidgets is a victim of its own success in this regard, because of the sheer number of compilers, platforms and configurations it supports. For each compiler, we could have at least four binaries: Debug, Release, Debug DLL/shared, Release DLL/shared. There are over a dozen versions of various Windows compilers supported, so now we're looking at over 48 multi-megabyte binaries for Windows alone. The situation with all the different variants of Unix, and several compilers per Unix platform, makes the total size of all these binaries quite mind-boggling, running into gigabytes.

So it's just not possible for the wxWidgets developers to keep binaries up to date when there are hundreds of possible different combinations. Even if we supplied particular configurations, users may wish to set different options for their own needs, and therefore would have to recompile the library anyway. Plus, only people with very good Internet connections would be able to download these large binaries.

We constantly strive to make the library as easy as possible to compile so the lack of binaries doesn't cause significant inconvenience.