Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] Audio-related widgets with Qt ?
From: Paul Davis (pbd_AT_Op.Net)
Date: Fri Sep 14 2001 - 18:00:30 EEST
>This might (?) be useful [in the event that a Qt port would be possible for
>Ardour etc.]
Bwahahahahahahah!
% cd /usr/local/music/src/ardour/gtk_ardour
% grep ';[ \t]*$' *.cc *.c *.h | wc -l
9207
% cd /usr/local/music/src/ardour/libs/ardour
% grep ';[ \t]*$' *.cc ardour/*.h | wc -l
4590
as you can see, the work involved in writing a GUI for a program like
ardour is at least twice that involved in writing the back-end.
Ask Werner if he'd consider a port of MusE to GTK :)) Trust me, with
programs like this, a "port" to a different toolkit is effectively a
complete rewrite of 2/3+ of the program.
>(b) The content of the vstgui library has been driven partly by Steinberg -
>but also by a lot of feedback from people implementing plug-ins. So the
>'widgets' implied by this are also very likely to be useful.
The widgets in libvstgui are completely generic. They are not "knobs"
or "ADSR" but "image sets" and "controllers" and "drawing areas". I
happen to like this approach, however. It does mean, however, that
libvstgui is more on the level of an existing toolkit (GTK+, Qt, etc.)
than a set of "high level" widgets. This makes it easy to implement
libvstgui (so get to it!), but it doesn't answer the desire for more
sophisticated widgets.
>I'm not in a position to contribute code right now (all my Linux time is
>attached to driver devel at the moment - not to mention needing to learn my
>way around Qt ;-).
>
>However, it would be nice to see Qt support for audio-related tasks.
I just want to mention one reason why I don't like using Qt myself,
not as flamebait but just to make it clear. Qt was written before the
Standard Template Library (STL) was reasonably standardized. As a
result, it contains implementations for things like lists, vectors and
many other container classes, that are part of the STL. For similar
reasons, it has its own string implementation. In both cases, the Qt
objects are similar to, but not identical to, the ones in the STL
and/or the standard C++ library. Since I happen to like the STL very
much (at least its design; some implementation details in libstdc++
suck bigtime), I am not comfortable using Qt's related-but-different
objects. A fair rebuttal would be "use Qt for everything", but given
the existence of some other C++ libraries that I appreciate a lot and
use the STL, this is not easy. Given a choice between two standards,
STL or Qt, the STL wins out every day for me personally.
--p
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