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Comment by jcelerier | Hacker News Reader

> This is kind of understandable as QT emulates the UI through its own library (unlike, say, Lazarus IDE / Delphi GUI library that directly use the native UI library).

In the end it does not matter that you push pixels from qt5gui.dll or shell32.dll, no ?

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Except that Qt might not be loaded/initialized by the time you launch your app.

I develop a Qt app which I benchmark regularly and the actual Qt initialization (from exec to an initialized QApplication) on an average computer is on the order of a few milliseconds (10-15 here).

Checked a bit more and the time to first frame, with GL set up, etc., is ~100ms.

Specifically, with regard to what we are discussing, it does as QT, technically, does a poorer job than the native libraries of the OS in "pushing" these pixels to the screen.

In general too, when it comes to user interfaces - a lot of work has already been done to make an interface that is familiar and easy to use for the user. Often the recreation miss some design goals or usability features or even edge cases, and that ultimately provides a poor user experience. (For example, some native UIs allow a screen reader for blind users to read out the the UI elements - if your UI library doesn't support it, blind users won't be able to use applications built with such a library).

QT does a great job for multi-platform application development. But like all other multi-platform toolkits, it does have its downsides.

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