Qt

[josh at offthehill.org (Josh ChaitinPollak)]

On Aug 19, 2006, at 9:25 AM, Matthew Gillen wrote:

> Stephen Adler wrote:
>> When looking at cross platform subversion clients, there are a lot
>> written using Qt. I haven't found any written using GTK. Is this  
>> because
>> Qt has a windows API and thus allowing you to write code for linux  
>> and
>> windows?
>
> GTK can run on windows too (see Gimp for Windows, Gaim, etc).  The  
> main
> difference is that Qt is a C++ framework (and a nice one at that),  
> while GTK
> is a C based one.  My wild guess is that most people today prefer  
> to write
> in C++ vs. C.  And C++ programmers will always prefer to use a  
> toolkit that
> is compatible with C++ idioms.
>
> The other major difference between the toolkits is license: Qt is  
> QPL/GPL,
> GTK is LGPL.  That means you can write closed-source apps with GTK,  
> while
> you need to buy a license from TrollTech to write closed-source  
> apps in Qt
> (writing GPL apps in Qt requires no additional license).  But for  
> little
> front-end clients, the license issue probably doesn't come up.

Qt also comes with extremely good documentation and the developers  
are very responsive. It also runs on OS X, if that is an issue, GTK  
only runs via X11 on OS X, which isn't very helpful for end users.  
The Qt API is very well organized too. I don't know if the same is  
true for GTK, but I found Qt extremely comfortable to work with.

There is Gtkmm, a C++ wrapper for Gtk, but I don't know if it is up  
to date, for a while it lagged behind.