gtkmm vs. Qt

Hi,

I don't want to start any flame wars. I'm just trying to collect some technical information for a discussion that's going on elsewhere. Hopefully, many people will give me opinions on this...

If you had to program a GUI application for Linux, and you absolutely, positively *must* do it in C++

To be honest, I'd use Qt. However, like I alluded to above, I only know Qt, but from what I have developed with it (Through KDE), I have to say it's very nice. Trolltech do 'cheat' a little by adding signals and slots to C++, but they're very nice, and function pointers do confuse me a little if I'm not on top form.

Qt has been designed from the get go to be used with C++, whereas gtkmm is a wrapper. Its previous iterations have been known as kludgy in places because Gtk+ was designed for C. However, I hear Gtk2 is a lot more OO than Gtk1 was, and the gtkmm feel more 'natural' because of it.

One thing that also sways my decision is KDE. KDE is designed to follow Qt's ideas and it shows. With Gtk if you want to make use of some Gnome technology, the chances are you'd have to use the C interfaces, which would lead to a bit of confusion due to using a mix of C++ and C, such as 'do I do foo.bar() or do I do foo_bar(obj)?'

So it really worth commenting? You can't possibly compare 2 things if you don't know anything about 1 of them.

Please give me URLs where people have said that. There were a few places in the gtkmm 1.2 API that used C types, but the gtkmm2 API is all C++, including signal handlers.

Note that the gtkmm developers do what they do because they prefer C++ to other languages, such as C or 'Qt C++'.

No, there is gnomemm, which provides C++ interfaces for the GNOME APIs. You're just guessing because you don't even know gtkmm.

I wouldn't say I don't know anything about them. I simply haven't really delved into

Well, I would if I could remember where they came from. One I have found is http://www.telegraph-road.org/writings/why.html which I read a while back and may not apply today.

I'm doing a computer science degree. Because of this, I have many of those things known as 'conversations' with people ranging from undergraduates to professors. I have had conversations about the relative merits of Gtk and Qt a few times and alas, I did not record them, so I can't really reproduce them.

Which I aluded to in my post.

This is all well and good, but I don't see what that's got to do with the price of fish.

All of them? Is there going to be a gnomemm stable release for when 2.0 comes out? Why are you so confrontational about it?

If you compared Gtk+ and Qt, then you would find that Gtk+ is awkward. But we're talking about gtkmm. And I'd expect an educated conversation to yield more than 'klunky'.

No. There will be a delay.

I make a point of correcting incorrect information, for the archive. I think that's helpful.

What was the URL I gave taking about? And as for the conversations, there are a number of factors: 1) I prefer C++ to C, so the relative merits of the C++ bindings naturally came into play. 2) Often, they are drunken conversations, and thus my memory is patchy. However, I do remember the resident GNOME fan admitting gtkmm 1.x was a bit of a kludge in places, whereas 2.0 is a lot more OO and thus the C++ bindings were a lot better. I have exactly zero experience with Gtk2 programming-wise, so I wouldn't know.

I never used the word 'klunky'.

Exactly.

I merely offered my opinion. There was nothing particually incorrect, at least nothing you have shown to be.

Sorry. You said 'kludge', of course. But still that's not very informative.

You said 'With Gtk if you want to make use of some Gnome technology, the chances are you'd have to use the C interfaces, ' But that's not true. If you said 'gnomemm2 is not yet API stable' then that would be true. But if we expected every API to be born fully API stable then we'd never even have an API stable GNOME2.

You're statements were vague, but generally misleading. That's OK, I understand that you were guessing.