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>> But Qt is also significantly harder to develop and maintain, especially if you want optimized application for minimal hardware. If by that you mean it's eas

>> But Qt is also significantly harder to develop and maintain, especially if you want optimized application for minimal hardware. If by that you mean it's easier to hack together some awful JS+HTML compared to hacking together a Qt application, I agree. If you want to build a maintainable, reliable and efficient solution, I don't think there is that much difference between the two. Qt has bindings to many languages, and even if you are forced to use C++ because of hardware constraints, the fact that the Qt front end API is a million times better (easier, better documented) than whatever JS frontend, offsets the language overhead. I'm not really sure anyone could say React or Bootstrap or whatever is 'easy to use' if you are not familiar with it. Easy to get a button on the screen, maybe, but that hardly makes a user interface.

sime2009 9y ago
Just a side note, but if you are building a commercial/serious product then your language options for Qt shrink down to just C++ and Python. Qt doesn't have many mature and maintained bindings to other languages.
- ahartmetz 9y ago
  This is true for desktop applications. On embedded, even PyQt or PySide could be difficult, depending on the amount of application logic required.
ahartmetz 9y ago
I can sort of confirm this. Disclaimer: I work with C++ and Qt and only know some basic HTML and JS. I have worked on a project where we reimplemented an HTML5... application (information omitted to protect possible secrets). We did it in a quarter of the time with IIRC a tenth of the staff from the original, according to those who did the HTML5 version. Line count was also lower. Of course not having to redo high-level design and some lower level services was a massive benefit for us, and HTML5 frameworks weren't as good at the time. Perhaps the most important point is that while they got a skeleton up in reasonable time, things slowed down greatly from there. The HTML5 / JS code was kind of hard to understand due to callback hell, and getting smooth performance took a huge amount of work. In the Qt version, we implemented it following some best practices and performance was great right away.

sime2009 9y ago

Just a side note, but if you are building a commercial/serious product then your language options for Qt shrink down to just C++ and Python. Qt doesn't have many mature and maintained bindings to other languages.

ahartmetz 9y ago
This is true for desktop applications. On embedded, even PyQt or PySide could be difficult, depending on the amount of application logic required.

ahartmetz 9y ago

I can sort of confirm this. Disclaimer: I work with C++ and Qt and only know some basic HTML and JS. I have worked on a project where we reimplemented an HTML5... application (information omitted to protect possible secrets). We did it in a quarter of the time with IIRC a tenth of the staff from the original, according to those who did the HTML5 version. Line count was also lower. Of course not having to redo high-level design and some lower level services was a massive benefit for us, and HTML5 frameworks weren't as good at the time. Perhaps the most important point is that while they got a skeleton up in reasonable time, things slowed down greatly from there. The HTML5 / JS code was kind of hard to understand due to callback hell, and getting smooth performance took a huge amount of work. In the Qt version, we implemented it following some best practices and performance was great right away.