Ask HN: Which parts of C++ do I need to learn in order to use Qt?

Inheritance; many Qt provided objects can (and should) be extended by you, to provide more functionality while still being Widget objects that can be displayed as expected and interact with other Qt objects. Coupled with this, how to feed an object of derived type to something expecting an object of base type, without slicing it or otherwise shooting yourself in the foot. Qt tends to pass QObjects around with pointers, which does make it harder to get this wrong.

Objects; they're all objects. Understand objects.

RAII/Constructors and destructors; managing object and resource lifetimes, and suitably ensuring that visual widgets and other such Qt objects are created and disposed of properly.

Threads; Qt Widgets (and your own objects) spark actions in Qt objects through signals and slots (fancy Qt meta-programming that takes care of a lot of boilerplate for you), that have rules about working across threads. Understanding threads is needed to understand these restrictions, and the GUI rule of "stay off the GUI thread" applies always, if you don't want to lock up the GUI. This means you'll need to create other threads to do the heavy lifting. You don't have to use standard C++ threads, but you'll need to understand threading.

Don't use QList unless you really have a good reason, even if you find old documentation saying you should.

I find the QThread class does a good job of abstracting the thread work, especially if you're going to hop between Linux/pthreads to Win32-64/whateverthehelltheyuse.

And the signals/slots do a great job of marshalling data across the threads, which is where I've found a lot of C++ projects get into the weeds.

Thanks for your reply. What little C++ experience I have is from several years ago - do you think (again, purely in the context of Qt) that any of the new C++11 features are worth using or should I stick to C++98?

As a rule of thumb, they're all worth using. C++11, to repeat something that's becoming a cliché, is like a whole new language.

Even in the context of Qt, it's worth using some C++11. auto, lambda functions, shared and unique pointers, (although QT has always provided its own versions of these), C++ 11 threads. I code heavily with Qt and I use these C++11 features daily. C++11 changes some things that used to be almost impossible into possible, and some things that used to be awkward maintenance headaches into natural and flowing code.

This is great; this is an opportunity for you to get to grips with some modern C++.

- I would advise you to focus on classes and object oriented programming. You will be able to catch up with the C++ imperative part if you already know any other imperative programming language. Keep in mind that you rarely ever need to deal with manual memory management. The STL (or Qt's) does it for you.

For a book about C++, I'll would go with C++ Primer.

- Qt by itself is a little bit weird, because it introduces its custom build process and it mainly uses a signal/slot mechanism for communication (thinks callback). Have also a look at Qt Quick, you can design an GUI without writing a single line of C++. There is a list of books about Qt there : https://wiki.qt.io/Books

Irrespective of technology, at some point the backend, C in this case, has to speak to the front end through some middle layer. Hopefully the middle layer and the front end will be self contained for the sake of modularity, separation of concerns, and avoiding the big ball of mud.

Charged with the task of making a GUI, I'd start with HTML, CSS, Javascript and REST. Absent some compelling reason to pursue another course, that's where I'd end.

Good luck.

You can write your UI in QML and only use c++ to wrap your c code in qobjects that you can access from QML.

This requires you to write a class that derives from QObject but that's almost it.

Your UI logic in QML is written in JavaScript but you don't usually need much and it's pretty straightforward to pick up as you go.

Depends on how complex your UI needs to be, but have you considered libui?

https://github.com/andlabs/libui

What about PySide or PyQt?

I'm going to recommend this as well. Whenever I need to quickly graph some data I use http://www.pyqtgraph.org/. Really easy to set up and 'pyqtgraph.examples.run()' gives you a nice diverse set of examples with the corresponding code to edit to your liking.

I considered using one of these libraries and writing the Qt GUI for my application in Python rather than C++.

However, I would like to build the application into a standalone binary for end-users to run on their own systems. This seems to be difficult with Python, and when I was able to build such a binary (using PyInstaller on Windows) it was large and slow to start-up.

(Qt itself is ~10MB (QtCore4.dll + QtGui4.dll) and (when using C++) can be made smaller by static linking, but PyQt doubles the size (python27.dll + PyQt4.QtCore.pyd + PyQt4.QtGui.pyd).)