Lately I've been getting back into desktop UI land to put a visual interface onto an image processing pipeline. I decided on Qt since it's C++ and the rest of t

Lately I've been getting back into desktop UI land to put a visual interface onto an image processing pipeline. I decided on Qt since it's C++ and the rest of the codebase is too (and cross-platform). This post encouraged me to go look at the output executable, and it's only 700kB! There are, admittedly, a bunch of libraries that it is importing (Qt, FLIR Spinnaker, OpenCV, Tensorflow...) but that's impressively tiny compared to other options. I've also been pretty impressed with Qt Creator! I'm generally an "edit all the things in Emacs" kind of guy, but started using Qt Creator basically because a) I'm not familiar with all of the method names on Qt objects yet, and b) the UI editor is handy. There's a lot to love here! It's snappy, it uses CMake under the hood to define your project, and it's got nice integration with some other tools (e.g. Valgrind and the clang linter). Plus doing a CLI build using CMake is quite straightforward.