[Qt-interest] The argument for Qt

[Till Oliver Knoll]

Am 20.10.2011 um 20:37 schrieb Rui Maciel <rui.maciel at gmail.com>:

> Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
> 
>>   KDE has been subjected to a hand full of major rewrites which 
> included switching the underlying application framework.  

That's new to me! From what I know KDE was developed from the VERY beginning on top of Qt:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.misc/msg/cb4b2d67ffc3ffce?

So no, the underlying framework - Qt - was never changed.


> Qt may be nice to 
> use but I suspect it takes a whole lot of work to maintain and develop, 
> particularly due to MOC.  

"Particularly due to MOC"? Are you seriously saying that you are measuring the complexity of a framework by a simple preprocessor tool? Granted, it provides great functionality such as signals/slots and the Qt meta system - but that doesn't add the complexity to a framework such as Qt IMHO!



>  I believe the latter option would be more attractive to a 
> considerable number of people.  

Not me! There's a good reason I chose Qt instead of fiddling around with e.g. MFC on win32 (yiekes!), trying to get my socket calls working across platforms, last but least I would like to start from scratch writing my own UI toolkit (and that's nowadays only a TINY fraction of the whole Qt API!)

>   If KDE's people were forced to also do 
> that job then KDE's resources could be stretched a bit too thin to the point 
> where the work invested in KDE would suffer from that.

So since you said "a considerable number of people" would prefer to come up with their own framework THAT would be LESS effort than maintaining and contributing to Qt?!


> 
> Also, I suspect that some would also find it preferable to simply develop a 
> simpler, leaner application framework, one which doesn't rely on MOC and 
> doesn't require a customized build system, instead of sticking with Qt.

Here we go again: write your OWN framework would be LESS work?! And last time I checked it was g++ which was triggered through plain old Makefiles - so what's custom about that? What's custom about using Visual Studio on Windows? Agreed, there are some extra preprocessor steps (moc) involved, but qmake takes care about them automagically.


>   but nothing forces KDE to 
> stick with Qt.  

You mean apart from the fact that 100eds of thousands LOC depend on it?! That probably doesn't even account for the whole software stack above it...

So yeah, let's rewrite it, let's start with the part which draws rectangles on the screen using XLib... ;)

Good luck I say! 
  Oliver