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Are the available FOSS cross-platform frameworks really not that good? There's at least Qt, GTK, umm, and, I guess Juce and wxWindows, right? Oh, I see there a

Are the available FOSS cross-platform frameworks really not that good? There's at least Qt, GTK, umm, and, I guess Juce and wxWindows, right? Oh, I see there are more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_platform-independent_GUI_libraries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_platform-independent_G... Can you explain what's deficient about the first two I mentioned?

MrDOS 6mo ago
> Qt Arcane build system. I mean, I guess it technically supports CMake these days, but I have never been able to get anyone else's Qt project to build without much gnashing of teeth. Emulated native widgets try for pixel-perfect, but tend to feel wrong somehow. > Gtk Outside of a Linux/Gtk native environment, Gtk applications are awful. Take GIMP on macOS, for example: it's had window focus issues (export dialog getting lost behind the main application window) literally ever since Gtk on macOS dropped the XQuartz dependence. And that's the flagship application for the toolkit.
- Pay08 6mo ago
  CMake support in Qt is perfectly fine nowadays. There are some (optional) custom commands you can use, but generally it's just plain CMake.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- einpoklum 6mo ago
  So, your critique of Gtk sounds convincing, but about Qt, you seem to be admitting they're offering a less-horrible way to build than how things used to be. I looked at this: https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/cmake-get-started.html https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/cmake-get-started.html ... and I'll admit they seem to be hiding some nasty stuff under the hood. But it still seems workable. I guess the devil is in the details?
hombre_fatal 6mo ago
GTK 3 hello world is 150-200mb. They really messed up since GTK 2 was 30mb (like macOS AppKit).
- WhyNotHugo 6mo ago
  GIMP itself is 62MB on my host, I'm not sure what kind of hello world you're building that's 3x that size.
  - einpoklum 6mo ago
    Maybe GP means on non-Linux systems? When you have to "vendor" a large number of libraries?
  - hombre_fatal 6mo ago
    Dunno, try it yourself. I wrote the hello world with C (12 lines?) and launched it on NixOS in Wayland (sway or niri). Maybe non-Wayland does better? Granted, not the best measure of memory usage. But the GTK 2 version was 30mb.

MrDOS 6mo ago

> Qt Arcane build system. I mean, I guess it technically supports CMake these days, but I have never been able to get anyone else's Qt project to build without much gnashing of teeth. Emulated native widgets try for pixel-perfect, but tend to feel wrong somehow. > Gtk Outside of a Linux/Gtk native environment, Gtk applications are awful. Take GIMP on macOS, for example: it's had window focus issues (export dialog getting lost behind the main application window) literally ever since Gtk on macOS dropped the XQuartz dependence. And that's the flagship application for the toolkit.

Pay08 6mo ago
CMake support in Qt is perfectly fine nowadays. There are some (optional) custom commands you can use, but generally it's just plain CMake.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
einpoklum 6mo ago
So, your critique of Gtk sounds convincing, but about Qt, you seem to be admitting they're offering a less-horrible way to build than how things used to be. I looked at this: https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/cmake-get-started.html https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/cmake-get-started.html ... and I'll admit they seem to be hiding some nasty stuff under the hood. But it still seems workable. I guess the devil is in the details?

hombre_fatal 6mo ago

GTK 3 hello world is 150-200mb. They really messed up since GTK 2 was 30mb (like macOS AppKit).

WhyNotHugo 6mo ago
GIMP itself is 62MB on my host, I'm not sure what kind of hello world you're building that's 3x that size.
- einpoklum 6mo ago
  Maybe GP means on non-Linux systems? When you have to "vendor" a large number of libraries?
- hombre_fatal 6mo ago
  Dunno, try it yourself. I wrote the hello world with C (12 lines?) and launched it on NixOS in Wayland (sway or niri). Maybe non-Wayland does better? Granted, not the best measure of memory usage. But the GTK 2 version was 30mb.