Commodity GUI library is coming

Commodity GUI library is coming

Posted Nov 25, 2005 16:40 UTC (Fri) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071)
In reply to: Commodity GUI library is coming by khim
Parent article: Imendio AB announces the GTK+ on Mac OS X port project (GnomeDesktop)

I personally also dislike the amount of functionality being bundled into Qt. I'm particularly uncomfortable with it's poor-but-integrated XML support, and the Arthur graphics framework in Qt4.

That said, you can still use expat or libxml2 with Qt. That's what a number of Qt apps do, because the Qt XML support isn't great. As for mixing C++ libraries, the biggest problem areas in my experience are "utility" classes - the things everybody needs, but the standard doesn't provide or does badly. Like a decent unicode string class (not std::wstring) or signalling mechanism differences (template based signals/slots, idl/precompiler based signals/slots, callbacks). Despite these issues, it doesn't seem that big a deal, and the Boost project helps a lot.

Qt4 lets you use the non-GUI parts of Qt without the GUI parts. I'll be interested to see how far that goes in the other direction - for example, it'll be interesting to see how comfortably Cairo can be used (portably) within Qt.

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