[Interest] Interest Digest, Vol 114, Issue 23

Turtle Creek Software support at turtlesoft.com
Tue Mar 23 00:32:06 CET 2021


Re: willy-nilly

I find this discussion interesting, because we ranted on the Cocoa-dev list
for a while and probably sounded a lot like Roland.  That was after we
spent 3 years porting our C++ desktop app from Mac Carbon to Cocoa, and
barely got half done.  With huge effort we might have finished about now,
just in time for M1, Swift and SwiftUI rewrites. It seemed prudent to give
up instead.

Many people seem to be looking for the same thing: a stable platform that
will stick around for a decade or more. They're not finding it, in Qt or
anywhere.  Summed up in this post:

https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/sad-state-of-cross-platform-gui-frameworks/

After leaving Cocoa behind, we tried updating our Windows app with MFC.
That was a horrible year. WinUi3 promises to make C++ apps easier but it
probably will stay vapor or be bungled.  So we tried Qt.

After 8 months, so far it is working great for our needs. We may even ship
something by late 2021.  But Qt's long-term future seems rather grim, and
that is very discouraging.  We have 15 programmer-years of cross-platform
business logic that's pining away for lack of a decent GUI framework that
sticks around for long enough to recoup the investment.

I can relate to anyone who is unhappy about deprecated functions.  It is
never fun when existing code breaks.  We want to be inventing new stuff,
not going back and fixing old code just to stay in the same place.  The C++
language has been decent about advancing, but still keeping ancient code
stable.  Windows bends over backwards to stay backwards compatible. I think
it's a basic courtesy that all platforms owe to developers.  Programming is
hard. Doing things once should be enough.

We know a lot about construction, accounting and estimating, and enough
about programming to make useful software for it. But we need tools that
let us spend time creating actual solutions.  Not reinventing wheels just
to have the same GUI.

Casey McDermott
TurtleSoft.com
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