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For windows what's your hello world workflow / stack. I've wanted to get into QT, but there seem to be a bunch of different flavors out there. I'm more a winfor

For windows what's your hello world workflow / stack. I've wanted to get into QT, but there seem to be a bunch of different flavors out there. I'm more a winforms guy then an HTML/XAML/CSS type person.

gmueckl 5y ago
On Windows, there are two easy ways to get started: Qt Creator and the Qt Addin for Visual Studio. Qt Creator is easier, I think. Personally, I use Qt Widgets a lot and ignore Qml, because the later has seemingly much less powerful widgets out of the box.
jcelerier 5y ago
I'll be honest I don't think that doing C++ on windows is a good idea. The language needs to do a lot of file access for includes, and on NTFS those are super slow, my builds on Linux are something like 1/3 of the time on windows (building the same software with the same commit of clang 12 and lld, same computer, same SSD). But if you don't want to install a Linux partition, then just use aqt to install Qt: https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall You want win64_msvc2019_64 as a platform. Way too often I see everyone clicking on everything in the installer which amounts to a 30gb download, but for the immense majority of Qt apps you just want the core libs for your platform which is like a couple hundred megabytes (and even then in practice you're going to use only a small part of those unless you have uncommon needs such as serial port, modbus or NFC communication, XML parsing, ...)
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  C++ builds are only bad when you use too many templates, which Chrome famously does. If you use MSVC you get some additional speedup as well because it tries to avoid disk IO. I would say Qt on Windows is probably a worse idea than just using .NET as it ties into the OS. If you need cross platform and normally use Windows it's not a bad idea.
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    > C++ builds are only bad when you use too many templates, if that was the case I would see the same build times when building the exact same project with the exact same compiler on Linux versus on Windows. Yet Linux is really much faster.
    - R0b0t1 5y ago
      No, you're right, NTFS as implemented in the Windows kernel is very slow. But for most work it's decent enough if you have a properly set up build system. The issue for some large projects is the build system is not set up well.
    - tomnipotent 5y ago
      Disable Windows Defender before your next build.
  - yakubin 5y ago
    Chromium uses templates very sparingly. Working with this code day to day, most days you don't see a single template. What it does use a lot of is class inheritance, delegates upon delegates, AbstractFryingInterfaces and whatnot.
- bigbizisverywyz 5y ago
  >The language needs to do a lot of file access for includes, and on NTFS those are super slow, I'm not sure I'd blame NTFS as such - but you can massively improve build times by creating a precompiled header .pch include file in your projects.
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    I already use PCH but can't put everything in them either otherwise it becomes a negative
- tomnipotent 5y ago
  > and on NTFS those are super slow Usually it's less to do with NTFS and more to do with Windows Defender Real Time Protection, which murders build times because it synchronously scans files before letting applications open them. You can disable on a per-folder basis, and it will change your quality of life drastically.

gmueckl 5y ago

On Windows, there are two easy ways to get started: Qt Creator and the Qt Addin for Visual Studio. Qt Creator is easier, I think. Personally, I use Qt Widgets a lot and ignore Qml, because the later has seemingly much less powerful widgets out of the box.

jcelerier 5y ago

I'll be honest I don't think that doing C++ on windows is a good idea. The language needs to do a lot of file access for includes, and on NTFS those are super slow, my builds on Linux are something like 1/3 of the time on windows (building the same software with the same commit of clang 12 and lld, same computer, same SSD). But if you don't want to install a Linux partition, then just use aqt to install Qt: https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall You want win64_msvc2019_64 as a platform. Way too often I see everyone clicking on everything in the installer which amounts to a 30gb download, but for the immense majority of Qt apps you just want the core libs for your platform which is like a couple hundred megabytes (and even then in practice you're going to use only a small part of those unless you have uncommon needs such as serial port, modbus or NFC communication, XML parsing, ...)

R0b0t1 5y ago
C++ builds are only bad when you use too many templates, which Chrome famously does. If you use MSVC you get some additional speedup as well because it tries to avoid disk IO. I would say Qt on Windows is probably a worse idea than just using .NET as it ties into the OS. If you need cross platform and normally use Windows it's not a bad idea.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  > C++ builds are only bad when you use too many templates, if that was the case I would see the same build times when building the exact same project with the exact same compiler on Linux versus on Windows. Yet Linux is really much faster.
  - R0b0t1 5y ago
    No, you're right, NTFS as implemented in the Windows kernel is very slow. But for most work it's decent enough if you have a properly set up build system. The issue for some large projects is the build system is not set up well.
  - tomnipotent 5y ago
    Disable Windows Defender before your next build.
- yakubin 5y ago
  Chromium uses templates very sparingly. Working with this code day to day, most days you don't see a single template. What it does use a lot of is class inheritance, delegates upon delegates, AbstractFryingInterfaces and whatnot.
bigbizisverywyz 5y ago
>The language needs to do a lot of file access for includes, and on NTFS those are super slow, I'm not sure I'd blame NTFS as such - but you can massively improve build times by creating a precompiled header .pch include file in your projects.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  I already use PCH but can't put everything in them either otherwise it becomes a negative
tomnipotent 5y ago
> and on NTFS those are super slow Usually it's less to do with NTFS and more to do with Windows Defender Real Time Protection, which murders build times because it synchronously scans files before letting applications open them. You can disable on a per-folder basis, and it will change your quality of life drastically.