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Well there have been some other articles that talk about using Qt, python's built in browser or Python+GTK over electron/HTML5 apps. There are a lot of people o

Well there have been some other articles that talk about using Qt, python's built in browser or Python+GTK over electron/HTML5 apps. There are a lot of people out here sick of things like Slack/Discord/Atom which each have the entire Electron framework that weigh in at 80 ~ 150MB. I'd be all for using GTK or QT if there were just better well supported bindings, with good documentation and examples, for languages like Python, Ruby, Rust, Scala, etc. I know some people love C++ and the newer C++11/14 seem to have cleaned up a lot of cruft (although GTK is in C unless you use Gtkmm), but I think the barrier to entry would be easier if their other language bindings had better docs. All that being said, this does feel very ad-like. Qt is commercial. I wonder if they're trying to push this stuff and make it look organic.

applecrazy 9y ago
I've been wondering for a while now why Electron isn't separate from the application bundle itself. Having an app simply declare its supported version of Electron and downloading one version for all apps to use would make a lot more sense in terms of disk space. I guess disk space is considered one of those "commodities" nowadays. I disagree (typing this from a 64GB SSD Mac) and HATE Electron apps for this reason. (Xcode, too, because it eats up disk space, but that's talk for another day)
dmitriid 9y ago
I used to call Qt ".Net for people who can't have anything better". When you code in Qt you rarely, if ever, are exposed to the hairy parts of C/C++. If anything, it feels like coding in C#. Nesides UI there are a gazillion helper and utility classes for everything from networking to threading to string handling. And with QML there's even less C++ :)
- majewsky 9y ago
  I actually just migrated a small Rust application to C++ with Qt because I have to use DBus and Qt has a very nice DBus library, which Rust has not. (In general, DBus hates runtime environments that don't have an event loop.)
  - ahartmetz 9y ago
    It's pretty hard to have asynchronous calls without an event loop ;) Using DBus synchronously is, strictly speaking, wrong unless you can PROVE that there can be no deadlocks; talking to the DBus daemon itself synchronously is generally safe though. Unfortunately QtDBus encourages synchronous calls. Maybe you remember desktop hangs in early KDE 4 related to global shortcuts - that was me not knowing that rule at the time.
xi- 9y ago
Qt has very good and well-documented Python bindings (PyQt). Also, QML has bindings for a lot of languages if you're not comfortable with either javascript or C++ for your backend.

applecrazy 9y ago

I've been wondering for a while now why Electron isn't separate from the application bundle itself. Having an app simply declare its supported version of Electron and downloading one version for all apps to use would make a lot more sense in terms of disk space. I guess disk space is considered one of those "commodities" nowadays. I disagree (typing this from a 64GB SSD Mac) and HATE Electron apps for this reason. (Xcode, too, because it eats up disk space, but that's talk for another day)

dmitriid 9y ago

I used to call Qt ".Net for people who can't have anything better". When you code in Qt you rarely, if ever, are exposed to the hairy parts of C/C++. If anything, it feels like coding in C#. Nesides UI there are a gazillion helper and utility classes for everything from networking to threading to string handling. And with QML there's even less C++ :)

majewsky 9y ago
I actually just migrated a small Rust application to C++ with Qt because I have to use DBus and Qt has a very nice DBus library, which Rust has not. (In general, DBus hates runtime environments that don't have an event loop.)
- ahartmetz 9y ago
  It's pretty hard to have asynchronous calls without an event loop ;) Using DBus synchronously is, strictly speaking, wrong unless you can PROVE that there can be no deadlocks; talking to the DBus daemon itself synchronously is generally safe though. Unfortunately QtDBus encourages synchronous calls. Maybe you remember desktop hangs in early KDE 4 related to global shortcuts - that was me not knowing that rule at the time.

xi- 9y ago

Qt has very good and well-documented Python bindings (PyQt). Also, QML has bindings for a lot of languages if you're not comfortable with either javascript or C++ for your backend.