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Comment by zephyrfalcon | Hacker News Reader

"""When starting a new project from scratch, I see no reason NOT to use python 3. Maybe if a few libs you depend heavily on are still not ported."""

wxPython comes to mind... :-/ Also PyGame, although it seems that there are now development releases for 3.x.

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wxPython largely[1] supports Python 3.

PyGame has worked on Python 3 for ages. Looking at [2] suggests it's from at least since the start of 2012.

[1]: http://wxpython.org/Phoenix/docs/html/classic_vs_phoenix.htm...

[2]: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/python-pygame-hg/

Pygame supports Python 3 in development releases. If you try to grab releases from their site they're something like 6 years old.

There are efforts being made to port Pygame as you mention but there's also the option of not using Pygame. I've written small games and OpenGL demos using PySDL2 and PyOpenGL in Python 3. It works rather well.

Project Phoenix (http://wiki.wxpython.org/ProjectPhoenix) seems promising. Have you tried it or do you know its status?

IIRC, I recall finding a post claiming it was stable enough for production use. Another post I found just now[1] suggests I am probably on the right lines.

[1]: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.wxpython/103221

Twisted too: https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/milestone/Python-3.x

Twisted and wxPython are a great combo and will keep me on 2.7 as long as they are not ported.

Isn't twisted largely superseded by asyncio?

https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio.html

I had to build a simple LDAP proxy recently, looked at twisted and asyncio and went with asyncio/python3. For that use-case, it was a perfect choice.

It's 2015 and you still rely on wxPython? You probably have bigger problems than the 3.x transition.

Which cross-platform native desktop GUI toolkit would you recommend instead?

I assume he's referring to Qt.

PyQT is GPL3+commercial.

PySide is Qt4.

GKT3 looks ugly outside Linux.

Tk looks obsolete everywhere.

wxPython is Python 2 and I think GTK2 on Linux.

Basically, there is no usable, modern cross-platform GUI toolkit for Python right now.

PyQt is very much usable. It's GPL3 but if you're using it in commercial projects, you shouldn't just pinch your nose because you have to get a commercial license.

Besides, PySide is porting to Qt5 too.

I'm not sure I'd pinch my nose over the cost of PyQt, but the cost of PyQt is pretty negligible.

The problem is the cost of Qt itself for commercial development - unless I'm misreading the Qt website I might choke and drown on the cost of a developer license for Qt ("1x Qt for Application Development ($350/Interval)") and (" This subscription is automatically invoiced at 1 months Intervals").

Maybe it's badly-written English confusing me, but that (and other info on their site) sounds suspiciously like "Developing commercially for Qt and being able to do maintenance releases requires a $350/month developer license." Oh, and their licensing FAQ specifically says that you CANNOT start on the LGPL version and change to the commercial license without prior permission from them.

Maybe it's just me, but if I'm going to be expected to spend $4200/year/developer (or "contact us" for a perpetual agreement), maybe I'd be better off spending a little money first checking out the other alternatives.

> PyQt is very much usable. It's GPL3 but if you're using it in commercial projects, you shouldn't just pinch your nose because you have to get a commercial license.

But I do and thousands of other people do as well. Today, the value-add is somewhere else, not in language bindings for GUI toolkits.

No offense to whatever it is you work on, but if you are a commercial project and:

- Can't comply with GPL3 and make your code compatible with the license

- Can't afford to pay for a commercial license

- Can't use a different language, such as C++, which has alternate offers

Then the problem is on your side, because either your business model is wrong or you're simply being cheap. You're not entitled to a free GUI toolkit for no good reason.

The measure is value for money.

For 350 GBP (=500 EUR), you can have Intellij Idea.

When you ask your boss for a budget for Nx500 (N=number of developers), it is a huge difference, if you ask that for language bindings for GUI toolkit, or IDE.

The language and GUI toolkits are both free, the glue between them is not, and that damages them both. How many commercial PyQt apps have you seen in the wild?

Exactly.

Imagine, if someone asked money for XAML for C#... or for JavaFX. What it would do with their adaptation in projects?

> How many commercial PyQt apps have you seen in the wild?

Not many because most people use Qt, not PyQt. It's just easier.

> Besides, PySide is porting to Qt5 too.

Is there any kind of concrete roadmap on this? All I've heard was basically "yeah, we want to move to Qt5 at some point in the future" back in 2013.

Yeah, activity picked up a week or two ago; someone has done most of the legwork to get the bindings auto-generated, and now there's the clean up to do.

That's very nice to hear. I was seriously beginning to fear that PySide was dead in the water.

I'd love to have a decent GUI toolkit for Python I could use with Apache or MIT code (without having to isolate the GPL bits), but I was nervous about being stuck on Qt4, so I was never terribly sure about PySide.

I assumed he was just trolling.

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