Re: The Future?

[Michael Torrie <torriem gmail com>]

On 03/09/2019 11:29 PM, Miroslav Rajcic wrote:
> IMO, it seems that GTK does not have a coherent strategy when it comes 
> to toolkit features and a cross-platform usage (i.e. lowering the effort 
> needed to develop for all major OSes). Nowadays it is mostly focused on 
> adding shiny things as support for shaders, animated transitions, GL 
> rendering.

Have you seen Qt lately?

Remember that GTK is a massive undertaking, carried by a relatively few
number of mostly volunteer developers.  GTK does have coherent
strategies and goals, but maybe they aren't quite in line with what you
think they should be.  Among those goals are the development of the
Gnome desktop environment and the development of graphical Linux (and to
a lesser extent, Unix) applications.  I suspect that if GTK future
development wasn't including shaders, animated transitions, and GL
rendering, folks would complain that it's lagging behind Qt which is
highly focused on these things now, and has been since Qt 4 days.

Qt is a commercial system, increasingly focused on mobile space, as well
as maintaining the traditional cross-platform GUI widget framework.
> From what I gather from your post, you likely aren't going to be happy
with the way Qt is going anymore than you appear to be with GTK.  Qt's
future and strategy is clearly declarative, responsive GUI layout (like
HTML and CSS), and heavy use of Javascript glue to animate it and bind
it all together, OpenGL (or Vulkan) for rendering, with your preferred
programming language only needed to do the back-end heavy lifting and
OS-specific interaction.  On the plus side, language bindings become
incredibly thin and easy, consisting mainly of a wrapper around the
QObject class (that's all that's required for QtQuick).

Anyway, it's not a zero sum game.  Qt being chosen by some does not
diminish GTK, or vice versa.  Nor should GTK simply follow Qt.  From
what Mr. Bassi has said, it sounds like GTK 4 will bring some impressive
features and capabilities.