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GTK-- vs. QT

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the technical-comparisons dept.

spirality asks: "The company I work for is getting ready to decide on a GUI Toolkit for our Computational Modeling Toolkit (CoMeT, www.cometsolutions.com). We would like C++ compatibility and ports to various Unices and Win32 platforms. Not supprisingly we've come up with two choices, GTK-- and QT. I've attempted to compare the two by doing alot of web surfing and searching, but I've come up with things that are consistently one or more years old. So, the question I pose is what are the (dis)advatages of GTK-- and QT, and why would I choose one of these toolkits over the other? Overall functionality, momentum for future growth, ease of use, licensing, and pretty much anything else is relevant to our decision." With QT now at version 3.0 and GTK now in the 1.2.x revisions, maybe it's time to give the two libraries some fair comparison and discuss the new features, advantages, and disadvantages of each?

2 of 325 comments (clear)

  1. Before the flame wars start... by CaptainAlbert · · Score: 5, Insightful

    My suggestion - try them out.

    Come up with a few small use cases and let your developers loose on everything you can get your hands on. Both Qt and GTK+ are freely available enough for that to be a useful exercise.

    You might find that, while Qt has nicer abstractions, and provides a familiar set of classes which are (IMO) far superior to MFC... perhaps GTK has a slight edge for lower level work (which it sounds like you might get involved in). Also, see which interface builder tools your team feels most comfortable with.

    The problem with this question is that the replies are likely to degenerate quickly into a C vs. C++ rant-a-thon. Yes, GTK is entirely written in C. But it *is* object oriented. It seems strange to everyone at first, but just because a language doesn't support particular features, doesn't mean that you can't use a particular programming style. OO methodology is just as relevant to C programmers as to C++ or Java programmers.

    If your programmers are good, they'll write good code whatever the toolkit. Just make sure everyone thinks that they got a say in the decision. ;-)

    --
    These sigs are more interesting tha
  2. Some REAL points by faber · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Developing for a professional product I would always go with as many professional tools as possible.

    To me QT seems to be the FAR better decision. It has true interoperablity between Win32, MacOS X and X11.

    QT is C++ from the ground up, GTK-- is wrapping GTK++.

    Furthermore with GTK you definitely write more code to accomplish the same.

    QT 3 gives you access to SQL-databases from its widgets.

    QT comes with a very good interface builder.

    QT based programes feel snappier than GTK based ones.

    One drawback might be that you have to preprocess (actually your Makefile has to) your code before its ready for the compiler, but that's not a big deal.

    With Kdevelop you have access to a very good IDE.

    One thing I don't know is how QT works in terms of different GUI threads, but I neither know for GTK.

    So please, go with QT and be happy

    A much harder decision would be: What should I use for my Web-Frontend, mod_perl or PHP... but that's a different story!