Re: [gtk-list] KDE Gnome Qt gtk--

[Guillaume Laurent <glaurent worldnet fr>]

Carsten Kind <kind@yang.thch.uni-bonn.de> writes:

> 3. Qt is the best available graphical Toolkit

Agreed.

> 4. gtk specially gtk-- is the closest completly free Toolkit to Qt.

Agreed again. IMHO, the far-too-many X toolkit choices can now be
narrowed to 2 : gtk and Qt (maybe 3 with Tk).

However, gtk (and especially gtk--) has *far* more potential than
Qt. I'm thinking of the "container-oriented" design of gtk, and the
very powerful slot/signal mechanism of gtk-- (much better than Qt's if
only because it doesn't require a special precompilation process)
here.

We've had the "Qt/Gtk compare" thread going on for a while on the
Rosegarden mailing-list, and another argument in favor of gtk is that
Qt is more than a graphical toolkit, more like a full-fledged
programming environment, with classes for files, strings, regexps,
which are here more for Windows portability than anything else. Nice
when you actually want to port to Windows, very bad if you only want a
toolkit.

The only thing I have in disfavor of gtk is that (oh boy am I going to
get flamed for this), it should have been written in C++ from the
start. This is a moot point now since the various OO internals
(inheritance, virtual funcs, etc...) of gtk are done and working. But
now that egcs and, since wednesday, gcc "Holy Grail" 2.8.0 are here,
I'm wondering if the original gtk authors would still choose C as the
way to go.

Choosing C over C++ certainly has helped keeping gtk so lean, however,
and I'm pretty sure that even now, regardless of 2.8.0 and egcs, this
argument would still hold.

Nonetheless, I'd like to add my voice to the request that the
"complex" widgets currently in gtk could be put aside in a separate
library. For instance, the gamma curve, toolbar, file selection (this
last one is debatable since it's so often used), tree and clist
widgets. And also that people thinking of writing such high-level
widgets very much should consider writing them in gtk--.

-- 
					Guillaume.
					http://www.worldnet.fr/~glaurent