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Comment by kombine | Hacker News Reader

Something that people already mentioned, but still. There is great Visual Studio for Windows and for cross-platform development there is Qt Creator. The latter also comes with a full-fledged development framework that allows you do GUI, threading, networking, databases: it is effectively what a standard library should be. It also really fast and has a slick interface allowing to do code navigation really fast. I don't have to tell you what I use for C++ development. So it will be very hard for them to compete with existing options.

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Qt Creator is a wonderful IDE. I've used many and never seen one better. And the Qt libs are underrated for non-gui systems development.

I find QT Creator underwhelming, especially compared to intellij. You have to stick to a single window, the interface to gdb causes me to pull my hair out most of the time under OSX, the refactoring support is almost absent, the keyboard shortcuts are a pain to manage (to make it emacsy, at least a bit).

I currently use eclipse for my embedded C++ project, and QT creator for QT apps (QT is wonderful!), but intellij for pretty much everything else. Looking forward to this.

Qt, friend, Qt. QT is QuickTime.

There's also KDevelop, cross-platform C/C++ IDE. I've only used it for C, and only on Linux but it was a great experience. It's supposed to support other languages as well, and I've tried python, but had no luck with it.

Except for the fact that Qt is not as cross-platform as the standard C++ library. Qt also uses non-C++ features such as signals/slots which require usage of their own Meta Object Compiler.

You can do stock C++ work in the Qt IDE, it's perfectly happy doing it.

Qt's moc is a preprocessor/code-generator which compiles to standard C++.

Do you also tell people that they shouldn't use flex/lex/bison/yacc/antlr/etc.? Why are those code generators/DSLs acceptable but the moc is not? It's not as if the Qt authors added it because they don't understand C++, they added it because it solves a vexing problem in C++ GUI design.

I would have agreed with you if Qt used something like the #pragma directive. Alas, they decided to inject keywords inside of the standard language which breaks every C++ compiler.

then... turn off the keywords?

Every Qt "keyword" you talk about can be disabled with a fallback to namespaced macros.

foreach -> Q_FOREACH slots: -> Q_SLOTS

etc.

I'm guessing it's aimed more at the embedded/system programming crowd. Visual Studio is a PITA when you aren't targetting Win32. Right now we use eclipse which has pretty substandard C++ support.

... and NetBeans. And Eclipse.

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