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Comment by detaro | Hacker News Reader

Qt makes it also easy to build the app cross-platform, so no, it's not really an argument.

If your Qt app has single C++ line of code cross platform builds become much harder. Also regardless you still have to solve packaging and updates for Windows, macOS and Linux. Also it's much harder to do QA and it's take much more effort to maintain cross platform Qt app in general.

For Electron apps it's all much easier because all native code is heavily tested by other commercial software and there is even on-the-fly updates possible.

PS: I shipped C++ apps built using Qt and cross-platform part is huge time sink.

How often and to what extent did you build using Qt? Your arguments against using Qt don't align with its actual capabilities. Qt has an extensive API so perhaps you weren't aware Qt possesses such capabilities which would be understandable if your exposure to Qt was transient.

>If your Qt app has single C++ line of code cross platform builds become much harder.

As I mentioned, Qt has an extensive cross-platform API; indeed that API is Qt's value prop. If you've the need to write arch/platform-specific UI code, then it's very likely you'll find the solution to that problem somewhere within Qt's docs. If not, then you cannot expect to be able to write such code using Electron/JavaScript.

>Also regardless you still have to solve packaging and updates for Windows, macOS and Linux.

What's to solve? Qt has had these capabilities. If you describe a specific issue, you may have an argument, otherwise this statement makes no claim.

>Also it's much harder to do QA and it's take much more effort to maintain cross platform Qt app in general.

How so? This is such a broad and unspecific claim to the extent it isn't possible to form a counter argument. State specifically the issues making it much harder to complete these tasks using Qt.

>For Electron apps it's all much easier because all native code is heavily tested by other commercial software

Qt's testing suite is extensive. Qt is and has been deployed and "heavily tested" around the world for years. Qt is also deployed as an embedded technology.

>PS: I shipped C++ apps built using Qt and cross-platform part is huge time sink.

I'm not sure you spent much time doing this because Qt makes shipping cross-platform software so simple it sometimes feels like I'm cheating (there are exceptions when dealing with very specific platform/arch-specific items as I mentioned above; there is no solution in JavaScript.). There must be some specific issue(s) you came across, but without specifying what specifically made you perceive using Qt a huge time sink, the statement makes no claim.

I don't have enough time to make extensive reply at this moment, but still wish to clarify a point that I trying to make here. Also I do like Qt and Qt Creator is my favorite IDE. And I wish there were less of electon apps that eating GBs of my RAM for no reason, but I also understand that our world is not perfect.

So here is the problem: open source project usually mean that it's gonna be project with just single maintainer for quite some time unless it's get like really popular. So you gonna work on C++ codebase doing everything alone with limited resources.

Qt have a lot of features, but it's still not comparable to what web stack has to offer. And if you take single external non-Qt library it's will make builds, deploy and testing so much more harder. And testing or debugging desktop software alone is huge pain in ass when it's cross platform. Running 3 different OS in VMs at least, etc.

Is Qt bad or lack something compared to Electron? No, not at all. But for 95% of open source projects C++ simply wont work. Messing with CMake, packaging and platform-specific mess most likely just gonna sink the project long before single developer manage to get it to stable, usable and user-friendly state.

> If your Qt app has single C++ line of code cross platform builds become much harder.

What is a Qt app without a single C++ line of code? Is it written in PyQt? Or did you mean a single C++ dependency? I assume you meant that, based on your later comment saying "if you take single external non-Qt library it's will make builds, deploy and testing so much more harder".

> For Electron apps it's all much easier because all native code is heavily tested by other commercial software and there is even on-the-fly updates possible.

I've had the opposite experience; if you can build your own application code using CMake, and link it with prebuilt Qt on a set of platforms, bundling extra libraries vendored with your program and built from source each time is not significantly more difficult than making your own "build from source" work.

On the other hand, in my experience with Python's native modules and observing others working on Electron Node native modules, if you're depending on prebuilt native binaries (the alternative is building native extensions from source, requiring everyone building your app to have a JS/Python toolchain plus a C++ toolchain that the JS/Python can find), you are at the mercy of the maintainer of the native extensions to fix bugs for you and release prebuilt binaries. That's unless you build and host your own native binaries with your own bugfixes and tweaks.

> What is a Qt app without a single C++ line of code? Is it written in PyQt?

Yeah I meant PyQt since when you use Qt bindings you mostly bypass burden of C++. With single non-Qt dependency it's just end up worse.

> I've had the opposite experience; if you can build your own application code using CMake, and...

Be honest about it starting with CMake: even CMake alone is a mess especially if you have to target not just latest version. It's has mixed code quality, non-existent dependency management (both Vcpkg and MXE are far from perfect) and require you to know tens different specifics if you want to build C++ project across Windows, Linux and macOS.

And if you want your open source project to be successful you need good CMake configuration so contributors across 3 different OS can easily setup development environment and builds.

I'm not gonna lie - I do far more experience working with C++ / Qt rather than Electron as well as other web-tech based desktop apps. But it's just crazy how many hours, nights, days and weeks I sinked into messing with CMake and debugging C++ project and some 3rd-party library build issues instead of actually writing the code for my projects.

PS: Might be I have somewhat rose-tinted glasses when I look at using non-Qt frameworks for desktop apps, but so far it's feels far more plausable to bring some project to completion if it's has nothing to do with C++.

Also, I suspect the main cross-platform portability issues you're likely to run into with an app like that are differences in filesystem behaviour, and developing it as web app doesn't really help there.

That's a good point - still you'd be sacrificing product development speed for the low level fs access, so the author should really make sure they know how much of it they'll need.

Given that BinFinder only needs the ability to read/write files and scan directories, it should be relatively cross platform out of the box. No real platform specific features, such as soft links, tags, etc necessary. On MacOS the app will likely need to ask for permission to access the disk, that's the only cross platform file system issue I see at the moment.

It depends on how dynamic the UI will be.

I was hoping to design something where on the left side there would be a tree of all the Bins (folders) and user would be able to click check boxes next to the folders they care about and the UI would instantly update with a list of matching Bins on the right side of the UI. Data would be pulled from cache stored in SQLite DB.

Can you see any issues with this on either Electron or QT? At first glance it feels like both should ok.

Should be possible with Qt widgets or Electron. Qt also has its own Electron-like web-based solution.

Qt widgets would likely be the fastest and lowest footprint. Though I'm not familiar enough to say exactly how you'd go about that.

Okay I hope you still readind replies so here is that: wanted to reply directly to topic starter since it's most relevant. Some might be taken my posts here like I hate Qt or something, but I really like Qt.

I don't see any issues with implementing your idea using Qt and it's will absolutely certainly be using less CPU and RAM without any optimizations.

Yet IMHO there is good chance that if you stumble into some Qt / CMake / C++ issue then you gonna be wasting ten times more time on initial implementation. This is C++ for you. And this might kill your project before you even get to first stable version.

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