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Comment by c-smile | Hacker News Reader

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Indeed.

So you are at the first mile of that road...

On the second mile you will discover that X11 is just a protocol to present bitmaps on monitor surfaces + plus generator of events coming from some of input devices.

So on the third mile you will decide that you will need system of widgets and you will get a tree of HWND's, GtkWidget* - UI DOM elements tree as an ultimate abstraction.

Somewhere on the way further you will come up with the bright idea that look and feel of those UI bricks in the tree needs to be customizable. So you will try to invent style definition system/language. And CSS will be born again.

As a result, at N-th mile, you will end up with something close to Sciter/Go : https://github.com/sciter-sdk/go-sciter that already works not only on X11 but on Windows and Mac too.

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Or you can stop halfway and be content with it being functional even if it is ugly. I'm pretty fond of Tk.

Or Tk, yes, if you prefer buttons a la turrets of Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger and musik of Sabaton.

Ttk enables modern widget rendering in Tk for those who can't appreciate the benefits of drawing without pixmaps everywhere. Been available for 10+ years.

10+ years ago Tk was already outdated in what concerns UI design.

Motif widgets on System 7 and Windows NT/2000? No thanks.

You missed the part about TTK, which makes TK use modern widgets, hence is nowhere near like "classic" TK and very much native in terms of rendering.

See https://tkdocs.com/tutorial/widgets.html#button

Any GUI developer knows that UI/UX is much more than just rendering the same.

Back when Tk still mattered even the attempt to emulate Win32 L&F was just partially done.

I very much doubt that it has improved.

It's not emulation, it's wrapper on top of native ui toolkit. win32 for windows, cocoa for macos.

I am speaking about when Tk mattered, around 2000's.

Who wouldn't!?

I’m going to borrow this comparison when someone recommends Tk :)))

Solid tech, but c’est la vie, software still folows fashion, as you so amusingly showed :)

> So you will try to invent style definition system/language. And CSS will be born again.

If he arrives at QML then he will be doing something awesome.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QML

Yes! I never understood why QML didn't take off more...

Licensing issues? The situation around Qt licensing is still not clear, AFAIK.

Seems pretty clear to me: https://www.qt.io/download

Most of it is licensed under LGPLv3, some under GPLv3, and there are commercial licenses available for almost all of it.

It is pretty clear, want to give your work for free to others as you enjoy using Qt for free? Then give it away for free.

Want to earn money with the work from Qt devs? Give them something back to pay their bills.

> Want to earn money with the work from Qt devs? Give them something back to pay their bills.

that's absolutely not mandatory with Qt's license (though a nice thing to do). Besides, a non-negligible part of contributions to Qt aren't made by The Qt Company but by others such as KDAB, etc... which won't see a cent.

KDAB already earns their money selling Qt expertise and advocacy, which they contribute back to Qt community.

My point was about those that want to use Qt as free beer, don't contribute anything back and even feel entitled to complain on Qt Creator and Qt bug reports.

> Want to earn money with the work from Qt devs? Give them something back to pay their bills.

I found that the model is good but the problem is that the Qt commercial licenses are quite expensive. You would have to reach really far to find an example of a product with a greater per-developer cost.

Qt commercial licenses are pretty cheap when compared with traditional enterprise prices, which has become their target market, given that they are the only ones willing to pay for tools.

They are cheap compared to what? They are more expensive than the highest tier of Labview licensing (!), way more expensive than the highest tier of Visual Studio (MSDN) subscription, Adobe CS, AutoCAD... I'm not cherry picking, they're literally the most expensive subscription based commercial software I'm aware of.

What are they "pretty cheap" when compared to?

Oracle, SQL Server, SAP, WebSphere, Rational...

Qt more expensive than Visual Studio Ultimate?!?

Qt more expensive than Visual Studio Ultimate?!?

Yup.

Hopefully it's apparent because of the extremity of the comparisons being made here (a production SQL Server deployment is more expensive than a Qt seat, yes...) how high Qt's per-developer cost is today.

In my naivete I would have said a decade ago that a single author of traditional shareware-type stuff should just include their source code. After seeing what happened to the Paint.Net guy, people taking his work and just renaming it (as well as removing credit and license info) and reselling it, I'm afraid closed source is still the way to go if you want to not get ripped off while distributing Windows consumer software. So the high cost of the Qt license becomes relevant there.

It's fine, it's their right to price their software however they like, etc etc. It's just a scary commitment if you want to experiment with putting a small product out there.

> Qt more expensive than Visual Studio Ultimate?!?

They're just calling the top VS tier "Enterprise" now. The subscription version of VS Enterprise (which includes office and Windows all the way back to XP) is $3k a year now.

Because many devs want to get paid without paying for the tools they use to sell their work.

Naturally with such culture one gets Electron instead.

IIRC, sciter isn't a free (libre) software, right? That might be a problem for some applications.

It takes quite a lot of money to convert the project to OpenSource. Social responsibility and maintenance, all that. I am accepting offers, if that is interesting.

Looking at the example screenshots of Sciter applications, it is now apparent to me why the GUIs of Anti-Virus applications all look so similar.

Sciter seems cool. Too bad it’s proprietary software.

Too bad my supermarket lady doesn't accept my push requests.

People want free software exactly because their supermarket lady doesn't accept their push requests.

They need to save money from somewhere, and until now, supermarkets never gave away stuff for free, where programmers do.

Yeah it is such a big offence to expect to be paid for our work.

Who is this response addressed to? Where did I say something to that effect?

To everyone that feels proprietary software is work of evil and we should just give our work for free.

Want open source stuff? Fine, but then pay the developers that created the software for their efforts.

Note I say the ones that created the software, not the ones that came after forked the repository and get to get money instead of the real authors.

That is why FOSS tools for RAD desktop development are so behind enterprise tooling.

a hint: it's very customary to inject a proper disclaimer into such kind of posts

So... many... frameworks ... What's the C version of Sciter?

https://sciter.com/download/

> include – C and C++ include files that define the public Sciter engine API: window level functions, DOM access methods and utilities.

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