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Comment by tejohnso | Hacker News Reader

Oh, he switched to QT for the GUI chapter. That's a significant change from FLTK. Should be well received as QT is popular in industry. Not sure how the learning curve will be affected.

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I wonder what Stroustrup thinks about the Meta Object Compiler. In a way Qt is its own dialect of C++.

The MOC is just a code generation tool, it's about as objectionable as bison. A far greater sin, especially in the eyes of Stroustrup, is disabling exceptions

> The MOC is just a code generation tool, it's about as objectionable as bison.

I think you've missed the whole point. No one cares about implementation details. The critical aspect is that Qt imposes the use of a superset of C++ which includes keywords such as signals and slots. Technically it's not even C++, but a language which has its own unique keywords, concurrency model, object ownership and life cycle, etc.

This is overly dramatic. The "keywords" are just macros. If you don't want an additional preprocessor to generate code in a separate .cpp file from these macros, you can use https://github.com/woboq/verdigris

The concurrency model, object ownership and life cycle you are mentioning are not part of C++, those are just conventions in specific C++ user groups - Qt code compiles plain and simple with pretty much every conformant C++ compiler and that makes it as much C++ as anything else.

He's name-dropped CopperSpice in some of his speeches, so he's certainly aware that it's not universally adored.

For the better, with Qt there is QtCreator.

Not sure what you are trying to say here. Qt, the library, and QtCreator, the IDE, are completely separate products. You can use QtCreator without Qt and vice versa.

Now, I'm pretty sure you know that, hence my confusion...

Qt Creator makes working with Qt a heck of a lot easier in a way that working with Visual Studio or vim does not. It comes with an integrated Qt form designer, Quick Designer for QML, supports Qt's moc syntax out of the box, integrated support for Qt Test Integration, native support for Qt Assistant and documentation and integration with Qt's internationalization tools.

The idea that "QtCreator" is some totally independent IDE that just coincidentally happens to have the letters Qt at the beginning in the same way that Java and JavaScript are independent of one another, but otherwise has no relationship to Qt the library is just patently absurd HN pedantry.

> Qt Creator makes working with Qt a heck of a lot easier in a way that working with Visual Studio or vim does not.

That's only true if you intentionally ignore all the aspects where Qt Creator falls way short of what "visual studio or vim" are leaps and bounds ahead.

> that just coincidentally happens to have the letters Qt at the beginning

That's not what I was trying to say. I just thought it's worth pointing out that QtCreator is really a general-purpose C++ IDE. (It's my favourite C++ IDE, btw.)

It can be a general-purpose C++ IDE and also very tightly coupled to Qt at the same time.

Visual Studio is also a general-purpose C++ IDE and yet I don't think anyone would say it's independent of Windows.

Sure. Actually, I think I misunderstood OP. I think what he was trying to say is that by switching to Qt you also get a nice visual editor in the form of QtCreator, to which I agree!

QtCreator helps with the learning curve as it‘s a very accessible IDE. One of the first IDEs I used in my career.

Sure, QtCreator is nice and it's actually my IDE of choice. I just wanted to point out that it is independent of Qt, the library.

How it compares to CLion?

He uses a custom wrapper library, so not sure how much (if anything) of QT proper is exposed.

All of the 4 AI coding assistants I've tried (claude3, gemini, gpt4, deepseek) used SFML for graphics when I asked them to code boids and game of life in C++. I'm wondering if that's because it's cross platform or that there's more code out there using SFML that these models got trained on? SFML seems relatively recent compared to Qt or even FLTK, so it seems kind of odd that there would be more SFML training data. It also seems odd that all 4 were in agreement here that SFML should be used for graphics in a C++ program.

SFML is a graphical library but not a GUI framework/toolkit that Qt/FLTK are.

SFML is more accessible for lightweight/exploratory/educational use, and so I wouldn't be surprised if it appears more often in training data associated with those simple "let's learn" sized projects.

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