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Intel Dev: GTK's Biggest Problem, and What Qt Does Better
Freshly Exhumed writes "Phoronix has an article about how Dirk Hohndel of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has stirred the hornet's nest with a talk at Australia's Linux.Conf.Au (MP4 file) about what he views as the biggest problem with the GTK: he finds dealing with upstream GTK/GNOME developers to be tough, with frequent abuse and flame-wars, with accusations from the developers that "you're doing it wrong." Conversely, he found the Qt development community to be quite the opposite: willing to engage and help, with plenty of application developer documentation and fewer communication problems than with their GTK counterparts."
Many years ago it was the only FSF-approved cross platform toolkit, so it gained a fair amount of momentum because of that. Qt has since moved to a more favorable license but a lot of people have yet to migrate.
The only reason to use it now is if for some reason you want to avoid C++ and develop in pure C.
Can we stop spreading false information about QT?
the native widgets for OS X / Linux / Windows
QT doesn't have native widgets for any platform, QT draw the widgets with their own code, it only skins them with the platform APIs if they are available, Quoting myself:
Native controls means more than to have the same look, if that is the way to measure "nativeness", then Java Swing UIs (Windows/GTK L&F) are native because they call platform theme APIs.
When a toolkit draw controls by itself, the applications normally lose a lot of UI functionality, for example, if Android/iPhone controls add proper default assistive technology metadata to their controls, the toolkit (QT in this example) need to do the same for each control they draw, because the OS don't see buttons as buttons, It see them as a custom control. If the platform control change behaviour in a new OS release, the QT control will not see it, for example when Windows added default context menus to the text fields, self drawed controls don't expose that behaviour until applications are updated with a new version
Do you even know what "existing toolkits" looked like at the time? They were solid crap. I'm no fan of GTK, but man, reuse of platform-provided functionality in a multi-platform toolkit is usually something you do at the beginning and then quickly backpedal on. There is a very good technical reason why Qt comes with its own raster rendering code, its own event loop, its own containers and atomics, and a host of other things: the platform stuff, if present, is broken in its own way on each platform Qt runs on. Or, if it's not broken, the standards the platform libraries follow simply leave too much to undefined- or implementation-defined behavior to, you know, actually use in practice. For C++ standard library that may be a bit of a less of a problem with modern compilers, but remember that even Qt 4 has to compile on some very broken compilers and very quirky platforms.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
it has its own object model, networking stack, container library, threading library, graphics primitive library (i.e. not Cairo).
the toolkit is split into modules that can be used completely independently of each other. If you only want the GUI stuff, you can use just the GUI module.
This object model also leaks into its language bindings if you don't want to write your software in C++.
binding are completely third party software to Qt. you might as well complain about gtkmm while you're at it.
It's the same problem that Java and C# also suffer from: they're not cross-platform, nothing is. What they actually are is their own platform built alongside a perfectly good already-existing one, and you can see the seams. There's more to each platform's UI than what bitmap you skin buttons and checkboxes with.
obviously you have not used Qt in the last five years.
where is the "-1 Ignorant" mod?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
How is this insightful? GTK guys modding this up? FUD. Qt is not written in some weird dialect. Where'd you pull that factoid from? I compile QT all over the place, Windows, Mac, LInux and embedded Linux using the VS C++ compile or gcc. On each of those platforms, it works VERY well. It's cross platform; more so than any other framework/language I've worked with. Qt apps look like Windows apps on Windows, Mac apps on Mac, Linux apps on Linux (if there really is such a thing)
Qt is LGPL now. It used to have the Q Public License, then GPL, now LGPL. They switched to GPL after they saw MySQL managed to retain profit with a GPL license and they switched to LGPL after the Nokia aquisition AFAIK.
no not retards, simply 'old'-style linux users,...
Qt was initially released in May 1995. It's not exactly a product of young people, and is almost as old as the Linux kernel itself. GTK was initially released in April 1998, almost 3 years later. The GTK devs are the new kids on the block.
instead of reusing an existing toolkit
GIMP version 0.54 (January 1996) "It had a dependency on Motif for its GUI toolkit, which made efficient distribution to a lot of users impossible."
A New Toolkit - The 0.60 Series:
Peter got really fed up with Motif. So he decided to write his own. He called them gtk and gdk, for the Gimp Tool Kit, and the Gimp Drawing Kit. Peter tells us now that they never intended for it to become a general purpose toolkit - they just wanted something to use with GIMP, and it "seemed like a good idea at the time". GIMP History