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Intel Dev: GTK's Biggest Problem, and What Qt Does Better

Posted by timothy on from the choosing-sides dept.

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."

3 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. GTK+ is a C library by i+ate+my+neighbour · · Score: 5, Informative

    The only reason to use it now is if for some reason you want to avoid C++ and develop in pure C.

  2. Re:GTK is trash by tibit · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  3. Re:GTK is trash by s1d3track3D · · Score: 5, Informative

    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