A Taste of Qt 4

Karma Sucks writes "In 'A Taste of Qt 4', Trolltech reveals that it is positioning Qt 4 directly against Java. Qt 4 promises to be smaller and faster than its predecessors and there will be a boatload of new features including support for non-GUI applications and accessibility under Linux using Sun's ATK. More controversial is the introduction of a new and elegant foreach construct. Incidentally, for those still opposed to Qt's moc preprocessor, Havoc has some interesting comments. It is possible the idea will be adapted to provide GObject introspection in the future."

Comments

Re:So

[moxruby]

I'm not a developer, I'm just a KDE user. I fail to see how there's anything revolutionary in here for me, or the other users. After all, software isn't just for the developers.

While you may not realise the benefits straight away, software being easier to develop means more, higher quality apps for everybody.

Java?

[bunhed]

..."positioning Qt 4 directly against Java"?

That'll be great to be writing servlets and jsp's in C++. *cough*

Happy Developers == Happy Users

[Derleth]

This should be obvious.

If the new Qt toolkit gives developers things to drool over, they'll develop more software. If they develop more software using droolworthy tools, there's a good chance some of that software will be droolworthy in and of itself.

A good API isn't the be-all and end-all of software design. But giving developers things to feel excited over is important, especially in the open-source world.

New and Elegant "foreach" ?

[PissingInTheWind]

Wow, a new syntactic construct. Stop the press.

Seriously, such rejoicing about new language features fills me with pity at the thought of those poor programmers stuck with whatever language constructs the "higher autorities" deems them worthy to have.

Lisp has supported extending the language for about 40 years. And people still get excited when they get a new syntactic construct for C++. That is sad.

If you want to find joy and productivity in programming, use Scheme, Common Lisp or some other programmable programming language. Free your mind.

foreach

[Bingo Foo]

If you use a c++ compiler with "typeof" (g++ has this) and STL containers, you can do this handy trick:

#define EACH( I , C ) typeof((C).begin()) (I) = (C).begin();\
(I) != (C).end(); ++(I)

that allows:

std::vector<MyBigClass> v = ...

for ( EACH( i, v ) ) {
... do something with i ...
}

which is very readable and maintainable. My guess is that Qt's foreach is something similar:

#define foreach( I , C ) for ( typeof((C).begin()) (I) = (C).begin();\
(I) != (C).end(); ++(I) )

foreach( i, v ) {
... do something with i ...
}

The problem is that this is too much of a departure from C++ syntax (foiling editor syntax highlighting), and the macro hides too much of the actual loop construct.

Trolling?

[brunes69]

2) A non GPL version of the library costs an outrageous sum of money.

If you think only 1500-3000 ( depending on package ) per developer for a perpetual license is a large amount of money, then you're either 12 years old or have never paid a dime for software in your life.

A manager of any team of 5 or more people would laugh at that kind of money. It is chump change compared to how much a company would spend on *paper* for pete's sake.

And if you take into account the developer's time ( which any manager must ), Qt is actually cheaper since it is so powerfull it takes on average 25-50% less code to do things in Qt than it does to do in other C++ toolkits I have used in the past.

I would use Qt even if I was only targeting Windows and even if I was the only person on the team. It is *that* good. People who knock it just do not have experience using it.