ah, yes, the famous difficulty of getting buttons on a screen in Qt https://streamable.com/bs5fxk
By the way - Qt and GTK are super-outdated ways to do GUI in C++. Popular, but outdated.
As an aside, do "modern" developers still write GUI applications at all, since everything is on the web anyway these days?
I even write terminal user interfaces sometimes to interact with servers that don't have a desktop environment installed.
The films you watch on TV or at the cinema were not created (edited, VFX) using a web browser for a start, and the User Interfaces to those applications are pretty Graphical by anyone's definition...
to add on this, the reference UI toolkit for building VFX tools is Qt. Maya, DaVinci, Lightworks, Nuke... are all Qt-based.
Not disagreeing with what you said, but "not having anything to do with the web" isn't as clear cut as it used to be and web technologies are increasingly showing up in unexpected places.
You want to be utilizing the features C++11, C++14 and maybe even newer versions of the standard allow you to use, to avoid unnecessary boilerplate, repetition, and arcane-ness of syntax and semantics.
Similarly, the GUI toolkit should not be based on C-like or C++98-like design patterns, when newer versions of the standard allow replacing them with more convenient patterns.
Here's one example, from the Nana C++ GUI toolkit:
#include <nana/gui.hpp>
#include <nana/gui/widgets/label.hpp>
#include <nana/gui/widgets/button.hpp>
int main() {
nana::form form;
nana::label label{form, "Hello, <bold blue size=16>Nana C++ Library</>"};
label.format(true);
nana::button button{form, "Quit"};
button.events().click( [&form]{ form.close(); } );
form.div("vert <><<><weight=80% text><>><><weight=24<><button><>><>");
form["text"] << label;
form["button"] << button;
form.collocate();
form.show();
//Start to event loop process, it blocks until the form is closed.
nana::exec();
}
#include <QtWidgets>
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
QApplication app{argc, argv};
QWidget widg;
QVBoxLayout form{&widg};
QLabel label{
R"(Hello, <span style="font-weight: 600; font-size: 16pt; color: blue;">Qt C++ Library</span>)"};
QPushButton button{"Quit"};
button.connect(&button, &QPushButton::clicked, [&widg] { widg.close(); });
form.addStretch(0.1);
form.addWidget(&label);
form.addStretch(0.7);
form.addWidget(&button);
form.addStretch(0.2);
widg.show();
app.exec();
}
g++ example.cpp -I/usr/include/qt/ -I/usr/include/qt/QtWidgets -fPIC -lQt5Widgets -lQt5Core
tl;ds: now that I saw it in action, I know I can instantly ignore anyone who says that nana is a suitable replacement for Qt.
... could you precise that more ? I'm literally just making "new project" > design view > search for the button component > drag'n'drop it ? How can it get more simple ?
(opening a text file and writing "Button {}" is definitely more complicated if we're talking about teaching to beginners)
if teaching beginners to programming sure, if teaching a programmer beginning QT development no.
as someone who teaches programming in university, that's definitely not true, less than 1 in 20 students has the reflex of looking for any kind of documentation (even after showing it to them)