I love how "professional" Qt code and API feels compared to GTK+ and how their team is not involved in any political drama. Always a joy to use their products.
Not a fan of comments that praise product A with some sort of vaguely axe-grinding reference to product B.
With GTK+ you get a Gitlab issue where everyone from GTK+ developers to /g/ users spout their opinions and then eventually the team and the developers take a decision that's probably going against at least half the comments in the thread.
With Qt you get "this is the API, live with it". I'd describe its API design method close(r) to the Windows API than any open source API I know of.
Sure, it creates a lot less drama, but at the cost of openness.
I'm not a fan of any Linux UI design toolkit, but I found GNOME Builder to be much more intuitive and working better out of the box than Qt Creator. GNOME's UI language may be... a choice, but Qt applications often feel like toy UIs or those fake operating systems you find in games without some pretty deliberate planning (and styling). With libadwaita being brought into GTK+ I think neither looks any good out of the box now, but the tooling for GNOME seems a lot better at least.
In terms of API and tooling support, I don't think any open projects come close to what Microsoft did with Visual Studio and C# back in 2005.
This is true often, but not always. Quite a bit of Qt APIs get created collaboratively on gerrit; I've had API changed based on my input. It's also possible to contribute APIs; I've done that, too. Some bigger new modules or API surface area is also moved through Qt Labs first before becoming part of the product, making for a longer feedback period. We've also had Qt folks actively attending events like Akademy to demo new WIP APIs and gather feedback and feature requests and engage in PoC ports of real software. There's also venues like the annual Qt Contributor Summit for larger discussions.
You're right that this open approach is not the only channel for APIs into Qt, and in hybrid communities like his there's always some tension, and of course having to be a little "in the know" or engaged in the community means there's perhaps a higher barrier to entry in some ways. I respect not liking that and preferring if there's only a community-based channel.
It's also worth pointing out that for the most part, Qt has a fairly healthy approach to low/mid/high level customizability and extensibility to its API. It has internalized this as one of the reasons for its success, even if it sadly fell a bit by the wayside during the early Qt Quick years. That means that "this is the API, live with it" is not really a straitjacket - you get to override, supplant, extend a lot.
Yeah, this is the part that hurts. So much work done on the backend and so many great apps, then to lock everything into that...
Bindings aren't ideal, I wish there was a native Linux gui toolkit with a "sane" language.
One of them is.
> Bindings aren't ideal, I wish there was a native Linux gui toolkit with a "sane" language.
There's none, because all the linux GUI toolkit developers are "sane" enough to make the toolkit x-platform.
If you're looking for "something that runs on linux, and linux only, and nowhere else" you are not going to find anything the way you find "something that runs on windows, and windows only, and nowhere else".
None of them I'd say. I'd argue moc is not C++
The macro incantations aren't massively complicated and mostly are simple labels placed in header files; body code rarely uses anything moc-related these days.
Compared to the crazy stuff Microsoft has done over the years within and on top of C++ on their platform, Qt's moc is barely a footnote.
I respect not liking it, and I totally get the appeal of doing the same thing with tools built directly into the language (which to this day aren't fully comparable, and are mostly recent - check into the verdigris project for a solid and interesting take on attempting this), but it's a reasonably straight-forward approach to the problems it solves.
It does have it's drawbacks. The MOC heavily penalizes build times, and build caching tools like ccache don't work out of the box with it. So not only does the MOC worsens builds, it also prevents basic optimizations from mitigating it.
> Compared to the crazy stuff Microsoft has done over the years (...)
Microsoft did a fantastic job with it's GUI frameworks. WPF is a stellar example of getting most things right. It's astounding how views are so trivial with WPF. XAML voodoo has it's critics but no one praising Qt would ever dare point a finger at XAML.
You have to compare those drawbacks directly to the alternatives, though. I don't have numbers to cite, but I think the attempts at replacing the moc with newer C++ lang features also usually didn't exactly hit the compiler fast paths.
Yes, perhaps optimizing the compilers would be nicer.
> You have to compare those drawbacks to the alternatives, though. I don't have numbers to cite, but I think the attempts at replacing the moc with newer C++ lang features also usually didn't exactly hit the compiler fast paths.
Maybe so, but this is not what my comment is about. What I'm saying is that MS has made much more invasive changes to C++ as a language than Qt has in its platforms or frameworks, e.g. compiler-backed extended and different behavior. Or look at C++/CX (since phased out, thankfully).
There's a lot of "If you're using Qt you're not using C++!!1" FUD to confuse newbies, while it's much easier to inadvertently write non-portable C++ with many other frameworks. Yes, it's a whatboutism (which I hope to have compensated for with many other detailed comments in the thread), but this double standard tends to irk me.
It's ok to claim that Qt's MOC optimizes for developer experience,and all other tradeoffs are acceptable.
> I don't have numbers to cite, but I think the attempts at replacing the moc with newer C++ lang features also usually didn't exactly hit the compiler fast paths.
This doesn't really matter. It's not just the MOC. Using Qt UI form files forces UIC into the picture, which also fails to be cached.
> Yes, perhaps optimizing the compilers would be nicer.
The compiler is not the problem. Obviously. WPF also uses code generators and it's not plagued with long build times.
> Maybe so, but this is not what my comment is about. What I'm saying is that MS has made much more invasive changes to C++ as a language than Qt has in its platforms or frameworks, e.g. compiler-backed extended and different behavior. Or look at C++/CX (since phased out, thankfully).
This reads like whataboutism, and fails to address Qt's problems.
> There's a lot of "If you're using Qt you're not using C++!!1" FUD to confuse newbies
I never saw that once, not do I understand why that is relevant.
of course, C++ eventually gained the ability to implement moc natively using a more general solution.
to me, moc and the Qt base classes sort of round out C++ to me in a way that is better than the alternatives. I can imagine an entire world of application development based on Qt C++ base, and in fact I've written a few network servers this way. Simply having event loops with message passing built-in makes programming that much more enjoyable for me.
Qt is C++ through and through. Even more so because of its MOC. It's really hard to port to other languages.
If we wanted a standard toolkit for Linux, it'd have to be written C to be compatible with most FFIs. The problem with Gtk is it's in coalition with Gnome, and its developers shun anything not fitting that scope.
Ho-humm, I'd argue that specific point. The meta-object system adds introspection and reflection, and helps it get e.g. fantastic Python bindings. Various other bindings are also basically built around wrapping QObject+QMetaObject.
Yes, binding Qt is anyway harder than GTK's C API. But not because of the MOC.
I’d argue that Qt API is pre-C++98, ie. pre std template library. Qt uses its own classes (vector, string, etc) instead of std template library. Even the MOC can be eliminated with the STL. Its an ancient API which is separate from modern post C++11. They’ve tried adding some STL and C++11 concepts, but they have millions of lines of legacy code to support, so its just more layers and bloat.
The community around Qt is pretty active at adopting modern C++, e.g. imho https://github.com/danvratil/qcoro is leading work.
I'm glad that folks clamor for keeping things fresh, but every 30 year old project is going to span a few minor revolutions along the way.
Also, alongside VCL/Firemonkey, miles ahead of any C++ UI framework produced by Microsoft, WinDev just has no taste in doing GUI tooling for C++ developers.