Is Qt still a good platform for new desktop apps? I often have to choose a framework for new line of business apps on Windows. The choice usually is WPF but I'd prefer Qt. Last time I looked into it it looked a really well thought out framework. And I am one of the weird people who prefer C++ over C#.
My only concern is availability of 3rd part components like data grids, reporting and other widgets. There are many of them for WPF but I am not sure they exist for Qt. Can Qt interact with .NET components?
Will it be worth it/extremely hard to learn C++ just to use Qt? (I always read here and reddit about how hard/inefficient/easy to fail is everything is in C++) (Eng. background and software dev full time)
C++ is worth knowing, if only superficially, without any regard for Qt.
My problem with Qt is that it seems like only Python has language bindings that are good long term bet for a project. I'd like to see bindings for Go, Rust, Node.js, and C#/.NET Core with dependable long term commitment to quality. I think there's more a business case to do these than there ever were for Qt Jambi(Swing and SWT existed) or PySide(basically, duplicating PyQt because it's GPL not LGPL).
Pretty big. If you want to use LGPL Qt you need to dynamically link, so deploying will get you around 20 MB of libraries. You can do a command line JUCE app in a few hundred KB, or a GUI app in not much more.
Is the support for static linking good in JUCE, such that you can release non trivial programs in a single binary with reliance only on system libraries that are pretty much guaranteed to be there.
Yes. I only use JUCE on OS X and Windows, but it's all statically linked and looks like it should be on other platforms. On windows you can change the linker settings from /MD to /MT so you aren't even depending on the MSVC redistributables that a completely bare system might not have.
As someone who have spent the last six months learning C++ (making the transition from web developer) all I can say is that it'll be hard for me to leave Qt framework. It's very pleasant to work with it (although some corner cases can give you headaches). I'm mostly working with Qt Quick/QML in general (previously I used the widgets but I needed "easy access" to more eye candy effects without spending too much time i…
> As someone who have spent the last six months learning C++ (making the transition from web developer)
Any particular reason why? I know a lot of people doing the opposite (because there are so many more web dev gigs out there).
As someone who have spent the last six months learning C++ (making the transition from web developer) all I can say is that it'll be hard for me to leave Qt framework. It's very pleasant to work with it (although some corner cases can give you headaches). I'm mostly working with Qt Quick/QML in general (previously I used the widgets but I needed "easy access" to more eye candy effects without spending too much time i…
> As someone who have spent the last six months learning C++ (making the transition from web developer) Any particular reason why? I know a lot of people doing the opposite (because there are so many more web dev gigs out there).
There are a lot of windows to be washed, and a lot of floors to be scrubbed too.
Qt is easily the best cross-platform UI kit that I have used, especially in combination with Python, which turns it into THE rapid prototyping tool. For my research I used PyQt/PySide to build lots of UI components for controlling my lab equipment, visualizing my data and running code in an interactive way. While doing this kind of thing using a native toolkit (MFC, GTK) would have been possible, it would probably ha…
I think it's a real shame the Python + Qt aren't more developed as a solution for creating cross platform mobile apps. At the moment there are several community efforts but most of them are half baked and have little adoption :(
The popular mobile platforms have never been very friendly to Python. In each case there was some conscious decision to favor specific languages very heavily rather than making it feasible to use different languages. It is hard to see how say PSF could fix this single-handedly.
Will it be worth it/extremely hard to learn C++ just to use Qt? (I always read here and reddit about how hard/inefficient/easy to fail is everything is in C++) (Eng. background and software dev full time)
Worth it if you need to use a cross-platform desktop framework and don't like java. C++ is most definitely harder to use than many (newer, thus) more modern languages but you will be rewarded by the niceness of Qt.
My problem with Qt is that it seems like only Python has language bindings that are good long term bet for a project. I'd like to see bindings for Go, Rust, Node.js, and C#/.NET Core with dependable long term commitment to quality. I think there's more a business case to do these than there ever were for Qt Jambi(Swing and SWT existed) or PySide(basically, duplicating PyQt because it's GPL not LGPL).
There are go bindings that are excellent ( https://github.com/go-qml/qml ). this, combined with the Google Material style kit ( http://github.com/papyros/qml-material ) results in very simple, clean apps with all the goodness of go. For me, the only drawback is not being able to expose a go object as a model, involving a bit of back and forth, but the rest is very very clean.
Go does seem to have the best bindings of the platforms I listed, but the reason I put Go on the list is that go-qml hasn't been a commit to the repository in over a year, the mailing list traffic has significantly decreased, and seems to support rather old versions of Qt(though this may be wrong, the docs should be update or made more clear that it means the older version and later).