Nokia's Maemo Switching To Qt

suka writes "During a keynote at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, Nokia's Quim Gil announced that a future release of Maemo is going to be built around Qt. Maemo Harmattan is going to switch away from GTK+ / Hildon, derStandard.at reports from the conference." Michael Pyne also writes with a post describing day one of the conference from a KDE perspective.

Comments

GNOME just need to die

[metamatic]

With the Mono infection and the reliance on GTK, the best thing would be for GNOME to go away. It started because Qt wasn't LGPL. That no longer applies, so let it die.

Re:Gtk+ is not Nokia's problem

[ultrabot]

No, they won't. C++ is fast for small inner loops because programmers there can take full advantage of its features. Big applications end up being slow and bloated in C++ because programmers simply cannot manage the complexity anymore: all their time goes into chasing pointer bugs and dealing with include files, and little remains for performance tuning and algorithms.

That's bollocks. C++ is not really that much less productive than Java/C# if you have a good platform toolkit to go with it (Qt). With Qt, you don't really manage your memory manually most of the time, the classes do it themselves through implicit sharing.

Admittedly, C++ is much less productive than Python & other dynamic languages, but that's not the issue at table here; we are comparing against Java, C#, ObjC.

And what is this "long run" you're speaking of anyway? If it takes 5 years for Nokia to optimize their current C++ applications, do you think anybody will care?

The phone applications easily have a life span of several years. They get improved, but rarely rewritten.

This applies even more so to "platform" level stuff. If you write more of that in C++ than Java, you'll have a faster platform, given equivalent algorithms.

There is no "in the long run" for software; what counts is what you can deliver in 3-6 months, not in a few years.

It seems Nokia was able to turn a profit with Symbian, even if Symbian is widely dreaded as the least productive programming environment in existence. I believe they will do great with Qt, and attract a great deal of third party interest as well.