The Biggest Problem With GTK & What Qt Does Good

[blackiwid]

While Dirk and Linus aren't enthusiastic front-end / application developers, they have found Qt to do much better than GTK for their cross-platform program.

. Dirk also found the Qt Creator IDE to be incredibly good. Dirk even switched from being a long-time emacs user to now using the Qt Creator integrated development environment.

I don?t really get that, the name QTCreator implies that its at least 99% a specialiest QT-Apps-Only Development Tool. When I go on their side their is nothing that makes me belive the opposite. Its even a part of the toolkit it self.

So when Dirk in reallity is not primary a GUI designer how can he switch from the feature-richest Development-plattform and Operating System Emacs to such a gui-only tool.
Of course u can write c and other stuff even in plugin-less gedit, but that makes it not a good IDE.

For me it sounds he never was able to use gtk or emacs productive because he always got angree that what he wanted to do, did not work the way he thought would be the best or something. And now he tries to troll with one post somewhere everything he hates, emacs and gtk.

[Detructor]

Dirk shared the same view as many with dealing with upstream GTK/GNOME developers being tough, frequent abuse and flame-wars, and accusations from the developers that "you're doing it wrong."

Pot meet Kettle, Kettle meet pot. Or in other words: And the difference between that an Linus attitude is exactly where/what?

[doom_Oo7]

I don?t really get that, the name QTCreator implies that its at least 99% a specialiest QT-Apps-Only Development Tool. When I go on their side their is nothing that makes me belive the opposite. Its even a part of the toolkit it self.

It really is not, you can do completely Qt-less project and I nowadays use only QtCreator as soon as there is a line of C++. Completion and refactoring tools are plain magic.

Also, QtCreator is easily extendable and redistributable with a specific set of plugins, for instance it is used in the Sailfish OS SDK.

I now only wait for the Python integration to be as good as the C++ one, because IIRC right now it's only doing syntaxic coloration, but there are no refactoring options and no completion, which would be a must-have for PyQt.

[JS987]

No it isn't. QML is little more than a DSL that can hook into the C++ Qt libraries, it vastly simplifies the creation of modern UIs hence why it's being pushed. But it doesn't stop anyone writing in C++, in fact it would being pointless writing anything other than trivial GUI applications in QML as it just wasn't designed for that.

Not entirely true, a new QWidget class was added in 5.2 alone - but I think you're right, this is the general direction for GUI applications. And I personally think it's the right direction.

This sentence makes no sense.

You can't use hardware accelerated QML widgets in C++ application without using QML language and Javascript. Using QML and Javascript during runtime isn't necessary.
Handwritten and generated C++ code are enough if there is good build system with fast rebuild.

New QWidget class couldn't be added because you can't have two QWidget classes in same namespace. Extending one class isn't big change as Widgets consist of many classes.

Non-trival QML application is written in 3 languages: QML, Javascript, C++. C++ and Javascript are incompatible with each other. You can't e.g. use regular C++ classes in Javascript code.
Javascript is very defective language compared to C++ because it is dynamically typed, prototype based, JIT compiled, garbage collected.

[Guest]

Pot meet Kettle, Kettle meet pot. Or in other words: And the difference between that an Linus attitude is exactly where/what?

Linus actually accepts patches that make Kernel better. His attitude is much different than gnome developers. Some of them are usually narrow minded morons that suffer from NIH syndrome.

[bnolsen]

have to agree with the complaints about qt5. seems like they started chasing fad stuff recently, bringing in javascript, etc. I guess they figured they get money by targeting big organizations that will invest in toolkits using DSL and leave behind those of us needing more simplicity. We dumped qt during the qt4 years, the network performance and even startup stuff was pretty appaling and at times it seemed like the toolkit was just pushing bugs around. Since our customers are generally production shops we switched over to fltk2, for which I wrote a nice font metrics based layout and resize engine. First comments were that the fltk apps were day and night in performance, lag and interactivity, even using an alternate prettier widget renderer. Note we bought the very first 2 licenses qt ever sold to anyone so its not like we are a bunch of amateurs.

[Nth_man]

seems like they started chasing fad stuff recently, bringing in javascript, etc.

New small and touch-screens require new developments, and an new approach. QML and Javascript allow descriptive and dynamic ("interpreted") management of interfaces, and so they ended up existing.

I guess they [BAD THINGS]

Stating that... is like waiting that someone answers "I guess you [BAD THINGS]", and this way the never-ending threads start.
Who knows? Maybe someone is right when he accuses.
It's no wonder that someone writes "where's muh popcorn? Quick!" in advance.

[PengZheng]

thx

CDT's parser sucks. Well "suck" may be a bit exaggerated, but it's nothing compared to QtCreator (which uses LLVM/clang afaik). I tried a shitload of IDEs for work on a ~1 million line C++ project and CDT just failed parsing it whole. Therefore code completion was worthless - which makes the IDE useless. If I don't have code completion/hints/etc. I might as well use vim, emacs or sublime text (although ST does have a SublimeClang plugin, so .....).

Anyway: QtCreator worked just fine with that source. It's even pretty forgiving. If it can't parse a certain include, you don't have code completion for that particular thing, but everything else is still handled fine.

Now I'm waiting for JetBrains to get their C++ IDE out the door. I love IDEA for my Java, Python and Scala projects and if the C++ part will be even half as good, I'm sold :-)

Thank you for drawing my attention to clang-based autocompletion. I just found and installed this clang-based vim plugin:

https://github.com/Valloric/YouCompleteMe

I also found another compiler-base tool, which use gcc analyzer instead of clang.

Now even if Eclipse failed to provide service, I have more alternatives.

[Tiger_Coder]

I use Qt Creator for everything too. If you don't know me, I work on Mesa and occasionally on the kernel, libdrm, piglit, and xf86-video-ati. Qt Creator is absolutely the best IDE I've ever worked with and before that I had been a long-time user of Visual C++ (the best on Windows at the time) and tried Eclipse and a couple of others. In Qt Creator, I only use the editing and compiling features and usually just do "Import an existing project", which creates a new project by importing all source files from a specific directory and subdirectories and runs "make" when I build it. It's pretty good even for kernel development. I usually import entire git repos, but with the kernel I only import the drivers/gpu/drm subtree and all the header files used by it. Thanks to the Qt Creator team, I wouldn't have been so productive without it.

Thanks you marek for your information. I usually use Geany for C++ coding but after reading your comment, I am thinking of giving Qt Creator a try.

[bnolsen]

New small and touch-screens require new developments, and an new approach. QML and Javascript allow descriptive and dynamic ("interpreted") management of interfaces, and so they ended up existing.

Webos tried html5/js applications, as did ios, firefoxos is again playing with this. They don't keep them for long. Perhaps my analysis may not exactly apply but it seems qt5 just jumped on this bandwagon which hasn't been panning out.

Qt is probably currently the most reasonable choice for a traditional cross platform desktop application library. But I do question people claiming that it's a great tookit.