Re: Framework Qt with c++

Andrea wrote:


I have to use it in my company. My predecessor in my job had /everything/
entagled with Qt -- even low-level networking stuff, where, for example,
he used the quint8 data type as bytes.

I am somewhat ambiguous about Qt, because whereas it has some nice features
but I'd rather not use it. Some criticism in detail:

(1) Qt "extends" C syntax by provinding features like sigals, slots,
     properties, etc. This leads to a huge amount of automatically generated
     intermediate C++ files (moc_<classname>.cpp) that implement these language
     extensions and are costly to compile. I often spend quite much time waiting
     for the compiler to finish after having made minor changes. (Actually, I
     suspect that this having to wait so much is also a design issue of our software).

(2) Qt defines elements that compete with STL, like QString, QMap, QList, etc.
     Being a great fan of the STL I see no point why Qt tries to re-invented
     the wheel. There also exist QThred, QFile, QDirectory, QApplication, qMax<T>, ...

(3) When you use the STL -- or templates in general -- (at least with Qt Creator
     that came along Qt 4.8) you'll find out that the IDE is not aware of templates.
     So when you have, say,
       std::vector<Foo*> foos;
       ...
       for ( std::vector<Foo*>::iterator i = foos.begin(), n = foos.end() ; i != n ; ++i ) {
           (*i)// Typing continues here...
       }
     then the IDE does not recognise the type of *i for auto-completion (but it compiles well).
     As I find auto-completion very helpful, in particular because it helps to avoid typing
     errors, I often end up in ugly idioms like

       for ( ... /*same as above*/ ) {
           Foo * pFoo = *i;
           pFoo// Typing continues here...
       }

If I could decide at my own I'd only use Qt for the GUI and keep the application
logic itself completely Qt-free. Such a Qt-free model also gives you the freedom to port
the software to other windowing toolkits.

Norbert