Re: Comparison of Qt to gtkmm

[<halbtaxabo-debml yahoo com>]

--- Joe Van Dyk <joevandyk gmail com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Are there any good documents out there that compare
> Gtkmm to Qt? 

If there are, I haven't found one. Like many other
people,
I tried to evaluate them (and wxWidgets and fltk) for
myself.
My conclusions:

1. Qt is much better documented than any other
toolkit.
2. Gtkmm is the better-designed library. It has a
better-designed interface, and coexists
much better with the STL. It tends to do things in
the way that a good object-oriented programmer would
do them; Qt IMHO does not. Qt uses a nonstandard
preprocessor, possibly because it was specified
before good implementations of C++ were widely
available.
3. Support through the communities is broadly
similar, i.e. both are somewhat helpful. (And
both are better than wxWidgets IMHO.)

So neither is "better" in an absolute sense. Each
is better in an important area.

In the end, I went with gtkmm, because its
documentation
may improve, whereas Qt's weaknesses are in its
specification - not really fixable without rewriting
the
whole thing.

However, all the opinions here including mine are from
people who picked gtkmm. The people who picked Qt have
good reasons too, that you should listen to.
And, documentation is very important.

I would say that Qt and gtkmm are the top choices, I
also looked at wxWidgets and FLTK and rejected both.
wxWidgets has a lot of documentation but it is poor -
I found it sometimes actually misled me. Fltk
had less documentation than gtkmm. Gtkmm's docs are
just
barely good enough, fltk's fell below my personal
threshold. YMMV, and of course fltk's documentation is
a
moving target, it has improved since I looked at it.
You might find http://www.fltk.org interesting. The
fltk community is smaller than the others so it seems
to take longer for bugs to get fixed, and the latest
version seems less stable. Please remember that these
are subjective impressions, though. I'd recommend
you play with at least 2 of these toolkits, build the
same program with them, find out what's important to
you.