Qt vs MFC

Philippe Fremy writes: "I have just published and translated into English a comparison between Qt programming and MFC programming, which was written by Pascal Audoux (a fellow coworker). I am interested in feedback and would love to add quotes from developers that have used both toolkits." Here is the English version ("Qt vs MFC") as well as the French one ("Qt contre MFC").

Comments

Good conclusion, poor article

[uradu]

While I wholehartedly agree with the conclusion, I must say that the article is a mess and feels like it was written by a 16-year old. It's barely comparative, sticking to the format that feature X is messy in MFC and much easier in Qt, and here's an example of just how easy. He doesn't give any MFC code examples, mainly limiting himself to explaining the horrors of Unicode and resources. An objective reader could hardly take this for a serious comparison of the two frameworks.

Besides, it's really comparing apples and oranges. Anyone who's used the MFC at all knows that it's hardly OO. A much fairer comparison would be that of Qt to Borland's VCL. In many respects they're very, very similar, but it seems that the nod of more consistent OO design would go to the VCL. I base this mainly on the event-handling semantics of both toolkits. While Qt falls back to straight C (or possibly even a macro? shudder!) for connecting an event handler to a component, the VCL stays faithfully OO, implementing event handlers as method pointers (exposed as properties) on components.

Continuing the example used in the article, Qt reads:

connect( button, SIGNAL( clicked() ), SLOT( action() ) );

while the VCL would read:

button.OnClick = action;

Anyway, as I said, while I support the conclusion of the article, based on its lack of maturity I wouldn't use it to try to convert existing MFC programmers.

Development tools?

[allanj]

As others have mentioned, the article is really badly written. I cannot comment on the merits of Qt, since I've done practically nothing with it. But I've done my fair share of MFC, and it's quite ugly - I find it hard to believe that *anything* solving a comparable problem can be much worse.
But my main point is this: When dealing with stuff like MFC you need to factor in the quite helpful development tools that the Visual Studio suite consists of. I have yet to see something of that quality from anyone else (except possibly Borland), and so far I've found only KDevelop to be reasonably useful. The MFC library (I flatly refuse to call it an object model) is ugly, but to some extent this is ameliorated by the IDE. I *know* this is not the way it should be done, but it's there and it DOES help...