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How Does One Create A Gtk+ Application?

blogs.gnome.org

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Re: How Does One Create A Gtk+ Application?

#21

Post by skriticos2 »

jeorgun wrote: post #14
scrollaway wrote: post #5

This post was written by Morten Welinder, the author of Gnumeric and a popular GNOME blogger. I feel really bad for GTK developers. The GNOME guys have clearly taken the toolkit from a "general purpose" direction to a much more gnome-centric one. At the same time though, I can't help but be hopeful for the future. Qt is a wonderful project, with a bunch of wonderful licenses, developed in a wonderfully-open environme…

I feel really conflicted about Qt. On one hand, as a graphical toolkit/environment, it's great. It's well-structured and easy to use, and QML is basically everything web applications should have been. On the other hand, as a C++ library it really couldn't be worse, with its flagrant reinvention of the standard library, pervasive UTF16, complex object hierarchies, raw pointers, extensive use of macros, etc., etc. Mayb…

I really like the Qt syntax. It's well though out, readable, I can overlook it without years of study and it has a good documentation. I think it helps to not think about it as C++ at all, because it isn't really. It's a syntax subset of C++ with a few extensions and it's own standard library that happens to use a C++ compiler somewhere down the toolchain.

I don't see the issue with the object hierarchies either. You have your QObject and QWidget classes that are important and then all the stuff that builds on that. Not that complicated really once you get into it.

The UTF-16 thing is ugly, yea, but I did never see a practical issue with it.

Re: How Does One Create A Gtk+ Application?

#22

Post by samdroid »

I really think this is exaggerated a lot. Maybe we don't use a lot of complex features, but at sugarlabs we have written a whole desktop environment and app ecosystem based of gtk3. We use the python gtk3 wrapper and I think there was only 1 instance this year where gtk3 broke our ui (icon_size got removed or something like that). We also use a lot of other gnome things (eg: gsettings) and those don't seem to be an issue.

Re: How Does One Create A Gtk+ Application?

#23

Post by stefantalpalaru »

ABI compatibility should not be a huge problem for distributions. They can just recompile all the packages linking against GTK+ when they update it.

The crazy stuff is having your window decorations disappear when running a GTK application under openbox because somebody thought it would be funny to screw with gtk+-3.12 [1].

[1]: http://redmine.audacious-media-player.org/boards/1/topics/11...

Re: How Does One Create A Gtk+ Application?

#24

Post by oliwarner »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #16
oliwarner wrote: post #13

There is a lot of truth in this but it does take a very lazy attitude to testing. The simple truth is that if you need your application to support certain distributions, you need to be there on the development releases testing them and either submitting bug reports or improving your application. And you can automate much of this with a pile of bootable ISOs and a scriptable virtual machine. Testing isn't new.

Can you explain testing actually solves this problem? The problem is multifaceted: it involves the behavior changes of a Gnome, which testing will find, and the unwillingness of some distros (I would imagine Debian is in there) to release new software for reasons other than security fixes, which testing doesn't and cannot address. The author makes it clear updating his code to fix the problems is not the problem.

That depends what you consider the problem in the scale of things. Needing to fight library versions is a pain but if you know about it (which I'm saying you can) you can do things to ensure your software —your responsibility- keeps working.

Testing helps you find issues before your users start knocking on your door and whining about broken software. They expect you to test. Is that fair? Not even the smallest bit... But it's the way things work.

If you don't give a crap about your users, and you only do this as a programming exercise, let your users be your first line of testing.

Again, I'm not saying that the problems described aren't real (or even that they're not frequent) but if you want to live in an ecosystem, you have to become a part of that. Get stuck in and fix these problems as best you can.

---

And maintaining security-only release structures is designed to make this very problem predictable and maintainable. You know what's going to be in the release a month, two months before it's out. Testing and fixing then means your app works for the life of that release.

Re: How Does One Create A Gtk+ Application?

#26

Post by general_failure »

jeorgun wrote: post #14
scrollaway wrote: post #5

This post was written by Morten Welinder, the author of Gnumeric and a popular GNOME blogger. I feel really bad for GTK developers. The GNOME guys have clearly taken the toolkit from a "general purpose" direction to a much more gnome-centric one. At the same time though, I can't help but be hopeful for the future. Qt is a wonderful project, with a bunch of wonderful licenses, developed in a wonderfully-open environme…

I feel really conflicted about Qt. On one hand, as a graphical toolkit/environment, it's great. It's well-structured and easy to use, and QML is basically everything web applications should have been. On the other hand, as a C++ library it really couldn't be worse, with its flagrant reinvention of the standard library, pervasive UTF16, complex object hierarchies, raw pointers, extensive use of macros, etc., etc. Mayb…

> On the other hand, as a C++ library it really couldn't be worse, with its flagrant reinvention of the standard library, pervasive UTF16, complex object hierarchies, raw pointers, extensive use of macros, etc., etc.

Have you given Qt a serious try? Most of the above arguments don't hold good at all. * c++ std lib is total crap. Anyone arguing for it has no idea what a good API is. Have you used Qt container? It's as intuitive as it gets. The C++ std lib is performance optimized and most desktop apps don't need it. It comes at a cost of developers having to learn complex APIs.

* Complex object hierarchies - huh? Qt's value based types need no memory management. The pointer types has a simple parent-child relationship. Delete the parent and all children are deleted as well. How hard is this?

* Raw pointers - Commented truly like someone who hasn't understood Qt.

* Why do you care about UTF16? It's an internal representation. BTW, Do you write any web apps? Do you know or care what internal representation is used by strings? If you some ultra-special case of a performance critical app, no string library out there will be good for you. You will have to roll out your own.

Let me guess. It really looks like you are one on the few guys who likes writing libraries (as opposed to apps). People who write apps love Qt. People who like writing libraries don't like any other library other than their own because their way is the true way.

There are many valid criticism of Qt but these are none of them.

Re: How Does One Create A Gtk+ Application?

#27

Post by michaelt »

oliwarner wrote: post #13

There is a lot of truth in this but it does take a very lazy attitude to testing. The simple truth is that if you need your application to support certain distributions, you need to be there on the development releases testing them and either submitting bug reports or improving your application. And you can automate much of this with a pile of bootable ISOs and a scriptable virtual machine. Testing isn't new.

It's not fair to put all the blame on the end developer IMHO.

I mean, in Windows, Microsoft obviously take care not to break binary compatibility - even across several generations of OSes. Right now, in my Windows VM I can run Office 97 on Windows 7 [1].

That's an 18 year old piece of software. And it's still working fine.

I upgrade Ubuntu and it's a flip of a coin whether Google Earth will stop working.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/compatibility/CompatC...

Re: How Does One Create A Gtk+ Application?

#28

Post by ikawe »

nawitus wrote: post #17

It's unfortunate that Linux and/or Linux distributions have not yet solved the problem of supporting parallel versions of dependencies. Even Node's package manager supports that. The end result is that rolling release distros break stuff often, as applications can't be tested and executed in isolation of each other. The "solution" to this is releasing everything every 6 months, when you can actually test everything t…

> Even Node's package manager supports [parallel versions of dependencies]

I feel like your emphasis is backwards.

It's not surprising that NodeJS, a new project, has solved some of these problems. NPM has the luxury of decades of experience from dozens of linux package managers and package managers from other languages. Plus, they're not tied to the legacy use cases the same way that (e.g.) apt is.

Re: How Does One Create A Gtk+ Application?

#29

Post by rjzzleep »

even though Qt might and wxwidgets might be better(wxwidgets is really more a wrapper to different gui backends), IMHO linux lacks a proper gui toolkit.

creating gui applications is much better in both windows in osx. Cocoa was a fairly well designed base api that gradually got improved. (yeah, there is a lot of valid criticism here too, but we're comparing it to gtk in this case)

We should build something that can gradually phase out GTK as was done with Carbon. If linux had a nice gui toolkit people would write more linux desktop applications.

Just my opinion. So feel free to completely disagree with it.

Re: How Does One Create A Gtk+ Application?

#30

Post by noobermin »

general_failure wrote: post #26
jeorgun wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel really conflicted about Qt. On one hand, as a graphical toolkit/environment, it's great. It's well-structured and easy to use, and QML is basically everything web applications should have been. On the other hand, as a C++ library it really couldn't be worse, with its flagrant reinvention of the standard library, pervasive UTF16, complex object hierarchies, raw pointers, extensive use of macros, etc., etc. Mayb…

> On the other hand, as a C++ library it really couldn't be worse, with its flagrant reinvention of the standard library, pervasive UTF16, complex object hierarchies, raw pointers, extensive use of macros, etc., etc. Have you given Qt a serious try? Most of the above arguments don't hold good at all. * c++ std lib is total crap. Anyone arguing for it has no idea what a good API is. Have you used Qt container? It's as…

No offence, but you calling the STL "total crap" can lend others to claim you haven't given the STL a serious try as well. A related stackexchange question on critisms of the STL [1]

[1] http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/268/stl-for-games...

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