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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. Qt has better documentation by tgreiner · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have only scratched the surface of both GTK-- and QT, but I found QT to have a *very good* documentation. It has a complete class hierarchy documentation and comes with a load of example programs.

    Another observation is that GTK-- is much more low-level than QT. If you want to extend it's components you might have to delve into the depths of the gdk library (which, in my view is only a thin wrapper around the X11-libs). QT on the other hand has a very good abstraction of windowing system details. Being mostly a Java programmer, I found the QT model very easy to use.

    Of course, YMMV.

  2. GTK-- is not GTK+ by marble · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A lot of people seem to have missed that the question was asking for opinions on GTK-- (now gtkmm), not GTK+. The difference being that gtkmm is the C++ interface to GTK+, so no C vs C++ dilemma exists here - both are C++.

    Well, nearly. If you're from a standard C++ background (as I am), you will find gtkmm preferable, as they don't reinvent parts of the standard library (eg QList vs std::list), they use namespaces and templates (including giving familiar, STL-style interfaces to container widgets etc), and it's implemented entirely in C++ (whereas Qt is in a C++ like language that must be first preprocessed to produce C++).

    But, as someone before me said; get both, try them, see which you prefer - there are obviously people who disagree with me, as KDE and Qt are popular.