Hacker News Reader

Comment by elcct | Hacker News Reader

I see nobody mentioned Juce. It is pretty neat if you like C++

JUCE is a great framework, has a very commendable coding style and is easy to get into. One thing to note is that the "JUCE way" of doing things is to have a UI that looks exactly the same on every platform - this is good for predictability, but if you want a UI that looks native, you're better off using Qt or wxWidgets (as C++ UI toolkits go).

In many cases I'd say that's not an issue, and JUCE is underrated/underused as a general-purpose UI toolkit.

commendable coding style

Please explain!

Well, commendable means "deserving praise", and when working with it, I generally appreciated the simplicity, consistency, and clarity I found throughout the JUCE codebase.

It also encourages you to adopt a coding style that's consistent with the rest of JUCE, particularly in terms of memory management. This is one of the things that makes it a lot more "framework" than "library", and again might not be for everyone. Take a look at the "Object lifetime and ownership" section in this page:

https://www.juce.com/learn/coding-standards

probably licensing and cost limit juce's popularity.

Licensing and cost is similar to Qt (free for open source, $$$ for commercial applications, though I think JUCE is cheaper). So, at least relatively to Qt, it doesn't particularly limit popularity.

And even in an absolute sense, you can't confidently say that dual-licensing limits popularity in the long term. If JUCE and Qt were free for everyone, perhaps they wouldn't be able to have the full-time developers they both currently have. So maybe they wouldn't be as good, thereby decreasing popularity against competing dual-licensed libraries. This is all wild speculation, of course, but it's an example to show how their model works.

Is it competitive with Qt for non-audio apps?

JUCE doesn't try and look native, it has it's own look and feel. Qt does on Windows and OSX. It really depends what you are trying to do.

Thanks for this. It sounds like JUCE is eliminated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com