Re: [gtkmm] Gtkmm or Qt?

[Ole Laursen <olau hardworking dk>]

Dr Mark H Phillips <mark austrics com au> writes:

[...]

> I am interested in people's views.  Is gtkmm (and gtk+) a serious
> option for my company?  In particular I'm not sure whether serious
> MS Windows support is there yet.  Also, development time might be
> slower because Glade isn't as advanced as QtDesigner.

I haven't used QtDesigner, but if it is anything like MS Visual
Studio, you must realize that Glade is a different type of
application. It is not a RAD tool (although it still has some support
for that), it is a UI designer.

What's bad about this: you can't just click your way through the
application development.

What's good about this: you won't create a huge unmaintainable mess.
Glade is not intrusive so you can focus on getting a good design
nailed down, while still cutting the GUI related code down to a
minimum. The gtkmm tutorial shows you how to get the design going. In
my experience, it is much nicer to work with once you get past the
first draft of the UI infrastructure.

> The other thing which concerns me is the web page:
> 
>   http://www.telegraph-road.org/writings/gtkmm_vs_qt.html
> 
> where Guillaume Laurent makes a strong case for Qt over Gtkmm.  Is
> there a response from Murray Cumming anywhere?  I have not been able
> to find one so far.

I wasn't here when Guillaume left, although I've gotten the impression
that there were some flamewars going on at that time (it was all
pre-2.0). I don't think you can expect anyone to be really objective
about it (and besides, both sides seem to suffer from outdated
information, e.g. Guillaume's point about missing wrappers for basic
stuff - that's definitely just FUD).

Qt and gtkmm are simply different - gtkmm is newer and closer to the
C++ style that the C++ standard library exercises.

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.auc.dk/~olau/