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A comment on JetBrains is working on a cross-platform C++ IDE. Parent comment

Re:JetBrains is working on a cross-platform C++ IDE by nnq on Wednesday April 03, 2013 @02:53AM (#5484672)
...a cross-platform UI toolkit will never be usable by just recompiling and having you GUI work just fine on another platform. Especially MacOS, which was always somewhat special about everything! It's good to learn just one GUI toolkit, but you'll need to split your codebase and even if you have the same base UI for different platforms, accept that lots of windows and dialogs and menus will have one MacOS version and one Windows version (usually you can skip the Linux one because Windows-style apps play well with Linux except for when abominations like Unity fuck things up...).
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Re:JetBrains is working on a cross-platform C++ IDE by jjoonathan on Wednesday April 03, 2013 @12:41PM (#5487157)
I never expected the UI to translate perfectly and effortlessly from one platform to another, since (as you mention) that's clearly impossible due to divergent design decisions in the platforms themselves.

However, it is not inconceivable that one could maintain a unified codebase and use a few platform-specific hacks to ensure that your app "philosophically matched" each OS. Quite possibly, one could still save net effort by implementing these patches vs maintaining a split codebase. If this were the case, I would be happy with Qt and I would sing its praise.

My difficulty with Qt stemmed mostly from the bugs. It simply lacked the polish of Cocoa and .NET in a way which noticeably and negatively impacted productivity. "Platforms are different" is no excuse for incorrect documentation, layout engines that are 1-2 pixels off at the edges, broken/incomplete keybindings, missing integration with launch services, and so on. I have the utmost respect for the Qt team -- I wouldn't have guessed that anyone could come so close to unifying the major UI kits -- but Qt still fell short of where it needed to be if it wanted to compete with the native toolkits.

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