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GTK-- vs. QT
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?
I've recently got my Sharp SL-5000D which comes with a cute embedded version of QT. I'm starting to play with it some more, and I have to say I'm impressed. I've not done much GUI dev. under 'nix before, but I've followed many threads in the past elsewhere that suggests GTK is a hodge-podge and is getting out of control, with no coherent design.
I'm not experienced, but as a lay-man, I'd have to say go for QT.
I actually prefer GTK+ and I think it's a better bet long-term, but I don't think the cross-platform aspect of the library gets much developer attention.
Being cross-platform is a major selling point for commerical Qt users, however, so if you need your apps to work on Windows then it's clearly the way to go.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
You may also want to take a look at the wxWindows toolkit. It's a wrapper over what's available on a given platform (the native API in Win32, GTK in the Unix world, and there's a Mac port in progress, I believe). Good stuff, definitely, especially if what you want is C++ and portability. Note that your apps will look totally windowsy on win32, so your users will not be confused by their look.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
...but a little slow on Solaris 8. Maybe it is just me, but my build of Mozilla really jerkey on a workstation (UltraSPARK III, 2G RAM). On the other hand The Gimp runs like a dream on my Windows box, and Mozilla is zappy on Linux.
--
Dooferlad
To pick up your point on licensing, Qt is either GPL or pay. So if your application will also be GPL, it's free, if your application will not be GPL you will have to pay up for Qt. GTK is LGPL AFAIK (enough acronyms for you? ;-) so that will not stand in the way of making your app non-free.
BTW, if you know C++ and want to get to know a bit about Qt, they have a pretty good tutorial online here. Just walking through the examples made me realize just how cool it is, and how much you can do in just a few lines of code.
If you intend to develop a closed-source product, the licence of both library will probably need to be evaluated too. If you go for
an open licence, then it's of minor importance.
(Qt requires licencing fees if you want to keep
your sources closed).
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.
I worked on a rushed project earlier this year, and used the gtk-- C++ wrapper for GTK, as well as the gnome-- wrapper (then still very much under development) for the Gnome libraries, specifically the canvas.
Personally, I found it frustrating to use. As these wrappers are still being worked on, the documentation is sketchy. The object-owning semantics are confusing (at least to me) - I was forever leaking memory or prematurely destroying objects. Trying to destroy something from within a menu callback I recall was particularly noisome. The gnome-- canvas wrappers were a moving target, though they may have since stabilised, and didn't fully expose the canvas API. Writing one's own canvas items is done in C, and then wrapped.
Perhaps with more persistance I might have figured out how to set up keyboard acceleration, but it is at anyrate a real battle to find documentation that explains what is going on with it. AFAIK, there is no straightforward way of making a multiple file selection in GTK+ 1.2. In gnome canvas (not GTK+, but a close cousin) there is promised functionality that is simply not implemented - I'm thinking here of smoothed lines, for which the code reads:
I haven't used QT yet. It certainly looks pretty, and a quick glance at the example code and docs provided seems to indicate that it's not too complicated, and well documented. I'd certainly shy away from GTK+ if a C++ interface is required.
The new version of GTK under development should address many of the shortcomings of the current toolkit, and includes goodies such as Pango. It is not yet in a stable state, however, with the API still undergoing final tweaking I believe.
If you want cross platform compatibilty with C++, then check out wxWindows. It has ports to Windows, MacOS (9 & X), UNIX + Motif, UNIX + GTK. It also has a very well developed Python binding -- so well developed that quite a few people want it adopted as the official Python GUI instead of TKinter.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Didn't they port gimp to win32?
gimp is THE flagship gtk application, bar none.
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
AFAIK, the Win32 port of GTK+ is more or less a one-man show, making GTK pretty unstable and lagging behind on Windows.
In addition, Qt now has a Mac OS X port.
Add this to the excellent commercial support from Trolltech.
Design and language issues not taken into account.
An example is the Komodo IDE by ActiveState, which uses XUL.
XUL is the next generation browser application platform. Simply speaking, the Mozilla team chose an approach very similiar to JAVA to come closer to a platform independent graphical user interface:
XUL goes one step farther, as there is no compilation step.
The XUL application implementation language is a XML language that together with cascading style sheets and JavaScript glue will yield an application one starts in the browser by opening the .xul document.
A possible advantage of XUL might become the relative ease of application development, change and distribution.
Possible problems will be similiar to the ones known from JAVA. The qualitiy of XUL applications will stand and fall with the quality of the XUL implementation for a specific platform, which right now means the quality of its Mozilla or Netscape implementation.
Of course, compared to JAVA, which has underwent several larger development cycles and now features mighty libraries, XUL is a bleeding edge technology at its beginnings.
However it is still possible to make direct use of the various Mozilla widgets as well from C++.
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!
I'm not trying to sound stupid or off-topic here, but have you considered Mozilla? Beyond ther browser, they've developed a really interesting cross-platform C++ (and JavaScript) development platform. For a start there's a cross platform implementation of COM and you can develop your UI's in an XML dialect called XUL.
Don't forget that an all-new GTK+ version is just coming out, a cleaner design, vastly improved i18n support, and all. I suggest you look at GTK2 (and it's C++ wrappers) as well, as this is what's going to be used, rather than the current version.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Geez. Talk about flamebait topic. Personally (and personal opinion only, here), I'd say, Qt is better designed, clearer, and easier from a programming standpoint - but it's actually not clean C++, what with its dodgy signals/slots stuff, that gtk-- manages to do within the bounds of the language.
If you're writing commercial, proprietary software, then you have to pay to use Qt - but Trolltech provide a thoroughly professionally supported toolkit to you for your money.
The Qt class library is actually more akin to the standard set of Java classes than just a widget set - there's decent cross-platform support for sockets, xml, threads, unicode, etc. It really makes C++ programming very easy.
OF course, there's other cross-platform C++ tollkits like FLTK... The gui toolkit page lists many more.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
...go for Qt. Gtk, IMO, has the huge disadvantage that the current 1.2 revision doesn't support Unicode, whereas Qt fully relies on it and even provides GUI-independent helper classes for all kinds of Unicode conversion that you can use anywhere in the program. This would also help for the mathematical symbols that you probably want to display. It looks like Gtk2 will use Unicode and Pango, thus potentially blowing away the competition, but as long as there's no stable version of Gtk2, I'd go for Qt.
From a conceptual point of view, I like Gtk-- better. It actually uses the modern C++ language, including the C++ type system. This way you avoid the need for a preprocessor, and get static typechecking instead of "dynamic typechecking" (i.e. "the user does the checking"), which is the entire point of using C++ in the first place. It also use the standard C++ library instead of duplicating it poorly, so you don't have to deal with multiple string types and the like. Since the application is a GUI frontend to a library written in standard C++, using the standard C++ library classes, this matter a lot. Qt is written for an ancient subset of C++, something closer to "C with Classes" than the C++ standard.
However, Qt is simple to use, well documented, and have stable API's. In practice, these make it much easier to use than Gtk--.
As an extra plus, Qt is GPL and therefore more gnulitically correct than Gtk--, which is only LGPL.
The big difference is that gtk-- is based on the C++ standard library, and so allows you do use familiar and efficient constructs like std::vector, std::string and so on.
QT has reimplemented all those things as a rather dodgy set of proprietry classes, which lock you into, for example using QString rather than std::string throughout your application, or doing a lot of extraneous conversions every time you need to talk to the GUI.
In its favour, QT does have much better documentation than gtk--, but all the same, I prefer the standards based gtk--.
Qt is 3.0
Gtk is 1.2.x
Sure it's friday, but come on, thats easy 3.0>1.2, so the choice must be Qt!
Same reasoning shows that Windows 2000 are MUCH better than Windows 98 which in turn is slightly (by 3 point) better than Windows 95, which again are MUCH better than windows 3.11.
Sigh. Does you youngsters not learn anything today?
Thomas S. Iversen
I have been using Qt for some years now starting with Qt 1.0 some years ago. I have also tried to both patch GTK+ programs and in one instance port one of my Qt applications to GTK+ (I was preferring gnome at the time).
The advantages I can see from using Qt is:
* Superb design. The OO design of Qt is really thought out. There are virtual function to do all the basic things you can think of and if you think of something really clever there are lowlevel routines to do that too.
* Superb documentation. A comprehensive, hypertext help and in Qt3 an included help browser. This is really an advantage since GTK+ not really being supported by a commercial entity suffer from lots of "I'll rather code than document" in the libraries.
* Good migration path to new versions. I have a program consisting of ~100000 lines of code (An Oracle client http://www.globecom.net/tora) which I migrated to Qt3.0 in about 2 hours, some of that time was spent using Qt3 specific features also like docked windows where appropriate.
* Not only a GUI toolkit. It also includes primitives for handling threading, I/O (files and sockets), UNICODE conversions and also some basic template classes made mostly obsolete now that STL is starting to actually work in GCC.
* Truly multiple platform. The application above was ported to Windows in about a day, all of the problems related to the fact that Visual C++ understands a different dialect of C++ than most of us are used to and that took some time write around, none of it was Qt specific. The extra thread and I/O classes really helps here as well.
/Mauritz
GlobeCom AB
The downside is that QT is slow, which is because they fake all the high-level UI calls with low-level code. That's how you can run a QT program on the Mac, but with Win32 or Motif look-and-feel.
:-/
The HUGE disadvantage is that QT programs will never be as fast as "real" Mac programs, because all the UI stuff (bitmaps for buttons, for instance) will eat up memory space and disk access time. The other programs get the UI for free.
It's also a practice Apple doesn't like. At all. Remember the Mozilla port?
There's also the danger that OS X will pick up some new feature, like for instance voice-controlled mouse movement to UI elements or whatever. Every program will magically work with them, except for QT-based programs which will just sit there and look stupid until Troll gets around to update their (closed-source!) Mac port.
...as everyone knows that the software with the highest version number is obviously the best.
(Score:-1, Sarcastic)
..make your application interface independant. The idea is to make your program a basic application that can run without a gui. The gui is then a plugin or something. That way you can take one application and write a gui using gtk, QT, win32, whatever you want and never have to rewrite the application. This is how licq works. The licq application is stand alone and you can download interface plugins for it, QT plugins, gtk plugins even command line plugins. This is great for me since QT doesn't run on the platform I use, so I have to use the commandline plugin.
Don't lock yourself into one gui and hope that it will cover all the platforms you need, most of them don't. Allow any kind of gui to work with your program, not only is it more cross platform compatible, but other people can create guis for your application without ever have to touch the applications code.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
GLUT, the widely used cross-platform wrapper for OpenGL, has problems when used in a multi-window application, and those problems affect GLOW programs. I've been documenting the problems and sending them to the current maintainer of GLUT, and they may eventually get fixed. Supported platforms are Win32 and X.
These alternatives are only useful if you're writing a 3D application. Otherwise, use one of the 2D toolkits.
I think Qt comes out ahead on the free/licensing issue; if you want to use it for free software, then Qt is GPL'd, but if you want to use it for commercial software you need to buy a licence - but most importantly that also brings you commercial support. In either case you have the source so that you can fix bugs or figure things out for yourself, but if you're working on a commercial project and under deadline pressure it's nice to have that commercial support available.
Now that we have been using Gtk--, we have relatively few regrets. The documentation was poor, for a time, but they have semi-recently improved the documentation, and it is quite workable. There are some small things that you would think would be done differently, but overall they are very minor and easy to live with.
Since we aren't concerned (yet) with porting our software, that wasn't much of an issue. Of course, your situation may be different there.
Finally, echoing what other people have said here, Gtk-- can be quite low level at times. I would recommend that if you decide upon Gtk--, you do what our company has done. We created our own set of libraries that provide standard looks to things with minimal hassle, derived from the Gtk-- classes. An example of this would be windows. We have our own window class that sets up standard options that Gtk-- allows to vary considerably. (Additionally, it automatically checks for certain keystrokes, like the F1 key, and signals that fact.) Making a button class would be similar, so all of your buttons are approximately the same size, have the same shading, etc. We were late in figuring this out, but it has greatly simplified our code and made our program look much more consistent.
> The downside is that QT is slow,
No, in fact, quite the opposite is true. It'd be faster than solutions that simply wrap around native API calls.
It is like in the Java world between AWT (Java 1.0.x) and Swing (Java 1.2.x). AWT tried to simply wrap around the native toolkits. As a result, it was quite slow. Swing does it like Qt, and provided an API for drawing widgets, much like Qt does with QStyle.
> eat up memory space and disk access time.
I think they alleviated this by using QPixmapCache. It should be only a tad bit slower, if not the same speed as regular OSX apps. Either way, an user would not know the difference in speed.
Al Stevens provides a column in Dr Dobbs Journal titled "C Programming". In the Sept-Oct 2001 columns he described issues he ran into testing both the Qt and GTK-- class libraries. I do not have the articles here but Al gave some pretty good C++ aesthetical reasons for staying away from Qt. Specifically he mentions having to re-compile some of the Qt libraries so that he could extent their class to properly convert from a STL String to their Qt string class.
He had many other reasons for not using Qt. When I get back to work from this long holiday I will post an outline of his specific reasonings.
Just to clarify. I am not an Al Stevens "fan". The man really seems off his rocker sometimes. However, the articles on Qt and GTK-- were very informative. And yes, I did investigate a few of the items for myself. (Do not trust my word though, get the article, read the article, try it out for yourself!)
"A sample size of one is really just statistical masturbation."
GTK
QT
Post Comment Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Bush's education improvements were
Actually, this is one point where Qt comes out way behind. Gtk++ is LGPL, which frees you to build commercial apps using it with no cost. Qt has a very infectious license where if you at any time use a free version of Qt on your project, then you can never release your project commercially.
And Trolltech dismisses shareware completely. They consider it to not be a viable approach, and so Qt can't be used for it.
Others wrote there are other toolkits as well but IMO they are nowhere near the usability of Qt. The often mentioned wxWindows is a wrapper around native widgets meaning that things like widget alingment issues become a pain in the butt as each platform will have widgets drawn in their native size. Also widget toolkits that wrap native widgets are diffucult to extend (by class derivation) so if you need to create your EnhancedComboBox from their ComboBox it's sometimes difficult to accomplish with wrapping toolkits. Personally I think going with an emulating toolkit is better than using a wrapping toolkit (fewer headaches). If you don't agree think for a minute why Swing in Java is considered an improvement over AWT. Same reasons.
FLTK is sweet if you don't need advanced widgets and i18n. They finally got their issues with keyboard focus fixed so it begins to look more and more like a real alternative. However, they use char* for text handling all over the place so it's certainly a disadvantage if you need unicode support. However, it is small and it is fast but it's only good enough for simple UIs.
You can't go wrong with Qt it gives you the power of something like MFC in a more digestible form with cross platform portability to boot! Also the sheer number of widgets available for it is pretty amazing. Oh, and the slot/signal thing isn't half as bad as some people here make it out to be.
1 vote for QT here.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
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.
Swing was initially much slower than AWT. However, as optimizations were made, it became almost as fast as AWT. If you have used a modern java, you'd know this :)
> Qt has a very infectious license where if you at any time use a free version of Qt on your project, then you can never release your project commercially.
Huh, what FUD. Qt has nothing of the sort.
> And Trolltech dismisses shareware completely. They consider it to not be a viable approach, and so Qt can't be used for it.
No they don't. If you have a commercial license, you can sell as much properitary, close source shareware as you want. If you use free Qt, you can sell as much of open sourced shareware as you want.
That's complete bullshit. Qt's commercial license has no clause like that. Only Qt's educational program has something like that, and no one is talking about that here.
Go away, troll.
I was examining cross platform GUIs a couple years ago, and gave wxWindows a try; it's ugly (full of arbitrary little macros) and, as the subject says, when I installed it and tried their example programs, some either failed to compile (or more likely) failed to work (my memory is unclear). Overall my impression was that it was a mess. Now, that was 2 or more years ago, but I haven't heard much about wxWindows since. We went with Qt, and it's clean & fast; I prefer it even to MFC (which admittedly may not be saying much).
Someday we'll all be negroes
> Being locked in like that tends to negate the whole reason for going with Linux in the first place.
You're neglecting the fact that he's not just working with Linux/X11, but rather a variety of platforms.
> which is completely open source (LGPL)
RMS himself considers the LGPL to be less open sourceed than the GPL. In fact, he really discourages use. Qt is more pure open sourced in X11.
[disclaimer: my real email address is @wxwindows.org]
> Not supprisingly we've come up with two choices,
> GTK-- and QT.
This surely is surprizing to me. I wouldn't consider GTK-- a serious choice for writing Win32 programs - sure, it "works", but have you seen it and/or used any GTK+ programs under Windows? But I would consider FOX, FLTK and wxWindows as serious contenders to Qt.
I can't speak of the others but let's compare wxWindows and Qt:
1. wxWin has almost all of the features Qt has
(it doesn't have some, but then it has some extras)
2. wxWin is free (as in beer too) for all uses
3. wxWin has native LNF, even under Windows XP
(which can be a serious advantage if you
target this platform).
But try it for yourself - wxWindows 2.3.2 is scheduled for Dec, 2 and has quite a few interesting new features. And see www.wxwindows.org for more info.
GTK:
GTK
QT:
QT
Excellent QT Tutorial
wxWindows:
wxWindows
wxPython
Mozilla:
Mozilla
Cross-platform implementation of COM
develop your UI's in an XML dialect called XUL
Others:
FLTK
Fox Toolkit
Side-by-side comparison of GUI Toolkits:
The GUI Toolkit and Framework Page
I needed this list for my own use. Maybe it will be of interest to you.
Bush's education improvements were
no, I said that the diffence in speed between Swing and AWT can't be felt anymore.
It is a officially supported first-rate platform being developed in the main Gtk+ CVS tree.
got drum'n'bass?
http://mp3.com/vitriolix
it also is a cross platform development platform. So it provides cross platform facilities for many activities - file access, sockets, database access
Just MySQL and PostgreSQL, or does it also talk to common proprietary DBMS such as oracle, sybase/mssql, etc?
printing, font handling, Unicode and internationalisation
How big does a distribution have to be to include glyphs for all 50,000 or so Unicode UCS-2 characters?
preference handling, XML support including SVG, various image formats
How much of the price of a Qt license covers the Unisys royalty for a popular "various image format"?
regexps, data and time classes, multimedia classes
Multimedia as in video playback? Is Qt trying to become like the other QT?
Does it handle press/release semantics for keypresses, or just press/repeat? Does it handle joysticks (erm, "industrial control devices")? Does it handle reading mouse motion not limited by the four walls of the screen (necessary for object manipulation in a 3D environment)? Does it handle sound?
Yes, I'm getting into the domain of Allegro or SDL, but only to show that Qt isn't the be-all and end-all of application toolkits.
Will I retire or break 10K?
> QT is nearing version 3
:0
:)
Qt3 was already released over a month ago
> Qt is mfcish
I don't think so. I find wxWindows much more mfc-ish.
But I agree with the rest of your post, use Gtk+ if you like C and Qt if you like C++. gtk-- is a rather poor hack. hopefully inti will be much better
And awt was slower/had less features on some platforms than others. I distinctly remember awt on MacOS being much slower than on windows, and not even using the System8 Toolbox calls, but rather using very antiquated calls.
No that's not true.
Heard of Qt non-commercial on windows?
Well, sure there is a difference between "designed for" and "ported to" (tho for some "designed for" means "press release for").
GTK 1.x was always portable -- designed so -- because the GDK was an abstraction layer that allowed porting to nearly anything someone had a desire to port onto (win32, framebuffer, whatever). I've used GTK under Python, and while it's slower than native Windows UI, it's more than acceptable for GIMP.
This fellow really needs to prototype some stuff using *each* of the closest candidates. If his schedule does not include time for prototypes, the software will be ready for a code rewrite MUCH sooner than they expect. I do Software QA, and I've seen the effects of rushing a project without proper homework up front. You *always* throw away some code, like it or not...
>However, Gtk2's win32 port will likely remain a very unsupported port.
Opinion presented as fact. There are *many* projects using GTK on Windows... just like there are many Qt projects on Windows. They're just ot very prominent (aside from GIMP).
.. And from what I read on the mailing lists, GTK 2.0 will be "officially supported on Windows (whatever that means), and the rendering rewrite has eliminated that "slow redraw" problem of GTK 1.x.
Cheers..
As it was mentioned before (and many times) GTK+ is coded in C, but is still object oriented. It uses an ad-hoc object system with dynamic typing, single inheritance. It's clean, but it's rather clumsy looking. If it had some kind of pre-processor it would look much nicer... wait! that would be just objective C! Wouldn it be nicer to have implemented gtk in Objective C? Just a random thought..
Try FLTK { www.fltk.org }
You won't be disappointed with the Fast and Light Tool Kit.
For download, go to ftp://ftp.fltk.org
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
> What if they go belly up or change the licensing?
Then Qt would automatically be released under the BSD License.
No, it's not. All the free licenses have that. non-commercial, free, educational, etc. Check the TrollTech General FAQ
That, along with the FAQs, statements, etc. from Trolltech's past seem to make it clear. Go check their site yourself. Perhaps have a lawyer check the mentioned Professional and Enterprise Edition licenses and let us know if you're right and Trolltech is wrong.
I'm not trolling, just trying to point out issues with the Qt licenses. If you start with a commercial license and never want to ship shareware with it, or if you start with the proper free license of your project and keep it open-source forever, then it's not bad.
I certainly wouldn't recommend you change from Qt to wxWindows... I do think Qt is technically superior to wx, but there are reasons why you might find wx more appropriate for future projects with different needs. Try installing wxPython and have a look through the demo app - I find this a great way of showing off the features/functionality/look/feel of wxWindows to people, even if all the demo apps are written in Python. You can get a good feel for the way the same apps would look in C++ even if you don't know much about Python.
Pete.
Yes, vim is just a text editor. Which is exactly my point. You have an application for each function you need to do, and thats it. No bloat, no mess.
Why would I want an app to do my Automake/Autoconf stuff? So I can spend days debugging it? So I don't learn anything and become dependant clicking a mouse? Its so easy to click those buttons in Kdevelop when I'm ssh'ing to my application server.
I must admit that I've never used Gtk--, as I don't write code in C++. I have written code with Gtk+ and Gtk-perl, and I found it quite easy and enjoyable.
There are lots of things in the world of software development. Lots of languages, lots of miscellaneous helper tools. Lots of IDEs. I've never used automake/autoconf in my development career, and I've never needed to. Hard as it may be for you to believe, autoconf/automake familiarity is neither necessary nor sufficient to be a good software developer, in C++ or any other language.
I get the feeling you'd say that a UNIX sysadmin who wasn't familiar with (and confident enough to modify directly)Personally, I actually do think that WYSIWYG "HTML editors" have a place. I also think applications like Lyx have a place. It's just a shame that at the moment there aren't any standout contenders in the HTML side that focus on generating standards-compliant HTML (at least as far as I know, I'd be happy to be corrected on this point).
As an aside, is there any particular reason you say "my 10 year old female cousin," rather than just "my 10 year old cousin" or "a 10 year old child"? Are you trying to imply that she's doubly disadvantaged in being ten years old and female? Or perhaps even more disadvantaged in that she's your cousin?
I assume you meant to say "GUI toolkit" there... as a statement like "there's no reason to tie SQL into a database toolkit" would seem more than a little bit senseless.Hard as this (again) may be for you to believe, but Qt is not just a GUI toolkit. GUI stuff is a large part of it, but not the only part. I mentioned in another comment that I know of one app, Doxygen, that used Qt without using any of the GUI stuff - simply because the author really like the fact that it abstracted the low-level platform-specific stuff so nicely.
I love it when people say something "sucks" and offer absolutely no explanation as to why they think it sucks. Try. Come on, have a go. Tell us why the terrible Qt licensing system sucks. Lots of other people in this topic have at least made an effort (and in the process demonstrated that they don't know what they're talking about), but I'm sure you can do better than them. Um... yeah... I'd like to see you use Quake on a piece of paper.WTF are you babbling about? If you want to restrict yourself to using a text environment, do so. Nothing stopping you. Of course, if you're supposed to be developing a GUI application, you might not be able to test it at all, but I'm sure that doesn't matter for someone like you.
Gee. A whole "nickle". Thanks.Pete.
Please mod parent UP, and mod grandparent down. mughi's original comment was unjustly robbed of karma. QT's strange licensing restrictions need to be brought to light.
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I'm sorry, but is that supposed to be fast? Compilation is mostly about header files unless you are using pch.
uhh, that was valid a few years ago, but not now.
Well, that is currently on their website, and not hidden either. They reference all other FAQ's there, and still have it as-is. Their FAQ's were even reved just this past mid-July and then late-September, so there's no excuse on their part. (Oh, and their GPL faq also includes the no-shareware mention)
If TrollTech has changed their position (and not just made an exception here or there), then the burden is on them to 1) Change their FAQ's that state all this (non-free and no-shareware), and 2) actually put the commercial licenses somewhere that they can be easily accessed.
If they have changed their terms, then at the least this looks like scare tatics on the part of marketing to try to get more developers to cough up the per-seat licensing.
1). It's not in the FAQ in their souce code.
2). It's not enforced. I know of several apps that this case has happened with. For example, Quanta Plus->Quanta Gold, KDE Studio->KDE Studio Gold, Pixie->Pixie Plus.
So, I think that this is probably an honest mistake on their part for leaving it up in their general FAQ (it belongs in their academic licenseing FAQ).