Subject: STL / Qt flame-war (Re: [linux-audio-dev] Audio-related widgets with Qt ?)
From: Tommi Ilmonen (tilmonen_AT_cc.hut.fi)
Date: Mon Sep 17 2001 - 14:22:46 EEST
Hi.
The title is (and hopefully remains) a joke.
On Fri, 14 Sep 2001, Paul Davis wrote:
>
> 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
I guess it depends on what one is used to. I have always found STL totally
painful, the headers are unreadable and some of the most simple operations
take enormous amounts of effort (like removing the n:th element from a
list). I also like Qt's way of giving giving warnings: "No such list
element", "Tried to delete object twice" etc. They do make the code a bit
slower, but the coding becomes a lot faster. And the (very few) critical
sections can always be optimized with other methods (I don't really
use Qt within DSP code).
AFAIK STL lack proper unicode support, thus STL strings are not very
useful for multilingual apps.
STL does have some really nice stuff, but I seldom need/use it anyhow.
At any rate, I find the question of containers is not very important. Qt
API usually hides the containers from the application developers
(QString and QStringList are some of the exceptions) so app developers
are free to use what-ever containers they like -> I do not see a conflict
between STL and Qt (since std::string is useless from my perspective
anyhow and strings are the only really obvious place where one is better
off using one standard only).
------
Now: let me tell why I do not use GTK.
After getting sick with Motif, Tck/Tk, OTcl/Tk and wxWindows I decided
that: "Heck this GTK looks really cool, I think I'll write i Gimp plugin
so I can test how it fits me". I copied one example plugin. I compiled it.
Great, it worked. I modified the plugin. Then it crashed. I reversed the
modifications. Then it worked. Then I tried another modification. And it
crashed. Then I repeated the modify->crash cycle with random success for
a few hundred times. Then I decided that enough is enough and went over to
Qt instead. I believe Qt has cost me fewer crashes in two years than GTK
in a few days. This -- of course -- proves nothing besides the fact that
GTK is not the idel toolkit for *me*.
PS. Qt 3 is going to make Qt templates fit better to STL thinking...
Tommi Ilmonen.
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