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Note that this is about Qt Creator, and not Qt. Though it is created by Qt company primarily to work with Qt, it is a very capable C/C++ IDE on its own right, e

Note that this is about Qt Creator, and not Qt. Though it is created by Qt company primarily to work with Qt, it is a very capable C/C++ IDE on its own right, even if you don't use Qt at all.

karmakaze 4y ago
So Qt is both a cross-platform toolkit and a brand of development tool? That seems confusing being not tied to using the Qt toolkit.
- sho_hn 4y ago
  It's more a side-effect. Qt is a C++ toolkit, and Qt-based projects are either C++, or use the QML markup language, or both. Projects that use Qt for the GUI or use other Qt modules often also use other C/C++ libraries (for example, in-house stuff) and they're often hacked on together. Therefore the free IDE you can get for Qt also happens to be a very good C/C++ IDE/editor. Qt uses CMake as its native built system - arguably CMake was popularized in general when KDE adopted it, a large FOSS user of Qt. CMake is not Qt-specific, and many other C/C++ libs use or integrate well with CMake. Therefore Qt's free IDE is also very good at general CMake support. Qt is often used for embedded or heavier IoT projects, therefore the IDE has useful features for deployment and remote debugging that also work for other stuff. And so on. The Qt Company doesn't really push/advertise Qt Creator much as an independent product, but the utility is really not bad.
  - karmakaze 4y ago
    I'm guessing that the part that would make it make sense for me is that the Qt Creator is made by the team that makes Qt or something in that ecosystem that's a label they give themselves. For instance I wouldn't call an IDE I made, Swing Creator if it was made with Java Swing but I had no other association.
    - sho_hn 4y ago
      Make no mistake, the main reason Qt Creator exists is to enable and promote Qt-based development and tick a box when selling to customers. They don't sell Creator individually (it's free), so they don't really make money from it outside of Qt sales. Qt competes for major business in markets like automotive or general embedded, where vendor frameworks are from the "one-stop solution for Windows" generation that come with IDEs aimed at specialists that get trained to use them, e.g. because they have a mechatronics/Simulink/etc background more than a programming one. Or because they're designers and used to Photoshop/Figma and you need something you can import into. These are often horribly old and crufty Eclipse derivatives or even OG Win32 MFC apps. Examples would be boutique solutions you've never ever heard of but probably used or seen in a car, e.g. the Kanzi toolkit, or STM's TouchGFX for microcontrollers. So Qt decided to make one too to round out the value prop. It's just that Qt (a) grew up originally as a desktop UI toolkit for PCs (so using it for a desktop app works out) and (b) is on a much cleaner, much more general-purpose tech stack, so it happens to actually be fairly good and reasonably general-purpose. Partly also because the Qt folks who wrote it simply used other desktop IDEs or classic hacker's editors before and decided to make a IDE they would themselves like to use. That said, The Qt Company has more recently done some acquisitions that actually do go more into the direction of branching out into development tools. They acquired Froglogic, makers of Squish (a GUI unit testing framework in wide use) and also a Coverity-like code scanner. So who knows, maybe they'll reposition Creator a bit.
      - karmakaze 4y ago
        If you don't mind my indulgence, does Qt Creator have any features specific to developing with Qt? Along the lines of Xcode being able to edit resources or graphically connect components, etc? Even a specialized search that's better at finding Qt things. That would take away all ambiguity.
        sho_hn 4y ago
        Yes. Qt as a framework comes with a built-in declarative markup language called QML (a superset of ECMAScript). Full IDE support for QML including debugging/profiling and also a visual design/editing mode are unique to Qt Creator. You can use Qt Creator while ignoring or perhaps even without realizing this is there (since also many, though increasingly fewer, Qt apps are written in pure C++ without any QML use), but if you do use Qt, it's of course a large potential value add.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

Note that this is about Qt Creator, and not Qt. Though it is created by Qt company primarily to work with Qt, it is a very capable C/C++ IDE on its own right, even if you don't use Qt at all.

karmakaze 4y ago

So Qt is both a cross-platform toolkit and a brand of development tool? That seems confusing being not tied to using the Qt toolkit.

sho_hn 4y ago
It's more a side-effect. Qt is a C++ toolkit, and Qt-based projects are either C++, or use the QML markup language, or both. Projects that use Qt for the GUI or use other Qt modules often also use other C/C++ libraries (for example, in-house stuff) and they're often hacked on together. Therefore the free IDE you can get for Qt also happens to be a very good C/C++ IDE/editor. Qt uses CMake as its native built system - arguably CMake was popularized in general when KDE adopted it, a large FOSS user of Qt. CMake is not Qt-specific, and many other C/C++ libs use or integrate well with CMake. Therefore Qt's free IDE is also very good at general CMake support. Qt is often used for embedded or heavier IoT projects, therefore the IDE has useful features for deployment and remote debugging that also work for other stuff. And so on. The Qt Company doesn't really push/advertise Qt Creator much as an independent product, but the utility is really not bad.
- karmakaze 4y ago
  I'm guessing that the part that would make it make sense for me is that the Qt Creator is made by the team that makes Qt or something in that ecosystem that's a label they give themselves. For instance I wouldn't call an IDE I made, Swing Creator if it was made with Java Swing but I had no other association.
  - sho_hn 4y ago
    Make no mistake, the main reason Qt Creator exists is to enable and promote Qt-based development and tick a box when selling to customers. They don't sell Creator individually (it's free), so they don't really make money from it outside of Qt sales. Qt competes for major business in markets like automotive or general embedded, where vendor frameworks are from the "one-stop solution for Windows" generation that come with IDEs aimed at specialists that get trained to use them, e.g. because they have a mechatronics/Simulink/etc background more than a programming one. Or because they're designers and used to Photoshop/Figma and you need something you can import into. These are often horribly old and crufty Eclipse derivatives or even OG Win32 MFC apps. Examples would be boutique solutions you've never ever heard of but probably used or seen in a car, e.g. the Kanzi toolkit, or STM's TouchGFX for microcontrollers. So Qt decided to make one too to round out the value prop. It's just that Qt (a) grew up originally as a desktop UI toolkit for PCs (so using it for a desktop app works out) and (b) is on a much cleaner, much more general-purpose tech stack, so it happens to actually be fairly good and reasonably general-purpose. Partly also because the Qt folks who wrote it simply used other desktop IDEs or classic hacker's editors before and decided to make a IDE they would themselves like to use. That said, The Qt Company has more recently done some acquisitions that actually do go more into the direction of branching out into development tools. They acquired Froglogic, makers of Squish (a GUI unit testing framework in wide use) and also a Coverity-like code scanner. So who knows, maybe they'll reposition Creator a bit.
    - karmakaze 4y ago
      If you don't mind my indulgence, does Qt Creator have any features specific to developing with Qt? Along the lines of Xcode being able to edit resources or graphically connect components, etc? Even a specialized search that's better at finding Qt things. That would take away all ambiguity.
      - sho_hn 4y ago
        Yes. Qt as a framework comes with a built-in declarative markup language called QML (a superset of ECMAScript). Full IDE support for QML including debugging/profiling and also a visual design/editing mode are unique to Qt Creator. You can use Qt Creator while ignoring or perhaps even without realizing this is there (since also many, though increasingly fewer, Qt apps are written in pure C++ without any QML use), but if you do use Qt, it's of course a large potential value add.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]