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Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by bshimmin on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @09:57AM (#8324465)
800,000+ developers seems like an awful lot. I work mostly on the web - do I just not move in the right circles to meet these Qt developers?
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by jeroen94704 on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @10:32AM (#8324642)
It is the blind spot of the Web/Silicon Valley/Startup world that not all programming is web programming. While the Googles and Facebooks of this world get all the press, there is a stupendous number of developers working on good old-fashioned desktop applications and embedded software. That is the world where Qt is very popular.

In fact, it is my opinion that Qt is the one thing that keeps C++ relevant these days (http://weblog.jeroen.ws/blog/2012/11/19/how-relevant-is-c-pl...).

Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by thegeomaster on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @07:59PM (#8327776)
This is exactly my train of thought. But a lot of these developers don't really mind not getting the press---these jobs do pay really well. As far as I know, for instance, C++ game engine developers or people who write powerful, scalable web servers for in-house use make quite a lot of money nowadays. It's a completely different life than the engineers working in risky, fragile startups in return for a high possible payout, but who has it better here is debatable... and a matter of personal opinion, I guess.

Still, writing about Dropbox or Facebook or Stripe or whatever is now hot is way more interesting for the journalists. However, there's no doubt that the guy who wrote nginx or the Unity team (the game engine, not the Ubuntu GUI) made a hell of an impact on the industry, too. It's just that it takes more technical expertise to actually appreciate what these guys have done. That's the reason why most of the people know Steve Wozniak (if at all) as "that guy who worked for Jobs." Not that Facebook or Dropbox or Stripe or Jobs don't deserve the praise, it's just that they've built their empires on technology that also does.

Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by vram22 on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @06:18PM (#8327423)
>It is the blind spot of the Web/Silicon Valley/Startup world that not all programming is web programming. ... there is a stupendous number of developers working on good old-fashioned desktop applications and embedded software.

I've always thought that myself. It would be interesting if there were some statistics on that.

Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by pjmlp on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @11:50AM (#8325079)
There are lots of things that keep C++ relevant, not only Qt.
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by anonbanker on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @04:25PM (#8326895)
Such as?
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by FooBarWidget on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @05:59PM (#8327338)
Big PC games are almost always written in C++.

The Phusion Passenger application server is in C++.

Node.js is in C++.

Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by _wmd on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @04:59PM (#8327089)
If you count C in the same breath, then between them, they make up the implementation language for probably 99% of other languages, and the operating systems those languages run on.

For anything safety critical, C in particular still has a vice-like stranglehold in many industries (e.g. automobile)

Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by rurounijones on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @02:37AM (#8328816)
> For anything safety critical, C in particular still has a vice-like stranglehold in many industries (e.g. automobile)

Which is kind of ironic, given its well known foot-shooting abilities.

Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by slavik81 on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @02:14PM (#8331452)
That's partly why the use it: the problems with C are well understood by many people. They choose the devil they know.
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by 72deluxe on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @04:48AM (#8329124)
The wonderful language itself, with broad scope for expressing ideas in a terse if not cryptic way. It's great.
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by 72deluxe on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @04:47AM (#8329117)
Not thought about that, but I suppose desktop apps are where C++ is truly relevant. I am not sure that it is entirely Qt keeping it relevant though!

I see the desktop applications being swallowed up by C# at the moment.

Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by selmnoo on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @09:58AM (#8324472)
That seems about right to me. Qt is very popular among people making physical products on embedded systems and such. The last 3 places I worked at all used and loved Qt.
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by checker on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @10:03AM (#8324492)
I just started using PySide which is a Qt wrapper for Python. So far it's been very good. I chose it because I can get familiar with Qt and eventually I may use it in my C++ projects too.
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by frownie on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @07:14AM (#8329440)
I concur. PySide makes developement/prototyping really efficient : the code is easy to read, no build system to maintain, no heavy tools to run, portability makes life so much better, you can freeze applications => deployment is super easy (well provided you don't have to copy the file on every PC's of the customer :); can't beat the web for that). And plus, Qt is very old and thus mature. It may not be as fun as the web development (which I admit is funnier, at least for the GUI part) but it provides a solid, predictible framework... Now I admit, I didn't play with JQuery which looks very solid too...
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by ColinCera on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @10:05AM (#8324497)
Almost all Linux developers have used Qt, because KDE, and Qt has been around a long time; a significant percentage of all C++ programmers have used Qt on one project or another.
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by acdha on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @10:32AM (#8324641)
Linux developers who write GUI apps. The many people who write server apps are unlikely to have more than user experience.
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by stevelaz on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @11:36AM (#8324993)
Speaking of non-gui apps with Qt.

In the past, I wrote a server app that was supposed to be cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Embedded Linux and eventually OSX). I chose to write it in C++ & Qt. That ended up being a bad decision because of the bloat. Since we needed the app to be able to run on embedded systems we couldn't use Qt. (We eventually wanted to be able to run on VxWorks as well). So, the size of the binary was too large. Eventually, I rewrote the app in ANSI C and saved a huge amount in the size of the static binary IIRC ~4MB (Warning, I don't remember exactly). The #ifdef code for each platform was one .c file for each OS with just a few functions on how to start/stop the service etc...

Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by 72deluxe on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @04:49AM (#8329128)
Did you ever try wxWidgets? The OSX support has come on leaps and bounds the last few dot releases.
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by stevelaz on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @04:11PM (#8332122)
Not for that specific project no. In the past ~2002 timeframe we used WxWidgets back when it was still WxWindows for a Linux desktop frontend. But other than that, I haven't played around with it lately.

I should take another look at it.

Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by 72deluxe on Thursday September 18, 2014 @04:26AM (#8334251)
It is worth looking at. There are multiple ways to connect events (signals/slots), and they encourage "Bind" these days, but you can still do Connect/Disconnect or use macro-based event maps (very MFC style).

But in general it's pretty good. There was a GSOC project this year to implement a DirectX backend to the Windows drawing system instead of GDI but I don't know how well that has got on. They overhauled the drawing system to using native drawing contexts on whichever platform you're running, so you can do aliasing etc.

It's worth a look I think, as it is quite easy to write something usable in it very quickly. There is no database support anymore though - wxODBC died a death.

Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by milliams on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @10:33AM (#8324646)
Though Qt provides loads of tools useful for writing headless applications. It's not just a GUI toolkit by a long way.
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by Touche on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @10:37AM (#8324664)
Even among GUI apps, GTK has been until very recently by far more popular.
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by sho_hn on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @10:42AM (#8324694)
By what metric? I'm fairly sure there's always been more Qt software than GTK+ software.
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by lmedinas on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @10:55AM (#8324780)
On Linux i guess so, on others GTK+ support is mostly dead.
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by Touche on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @12:28PM (#8325331)
Fair.
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by pjmlp on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @11:45AM (#8325040)
I imagine you mean on GNU/Linux.
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by shmerl on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @11:00AM (#8324816)
Many projects recently started switching from GTK to Qt.
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by Qworg on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @10:00AM (#8324479)
If you do web work, you likely won't meet anyone doing Qt. I've used it for robot and industrial machine UIs.
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by malkia on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @10:05AM (#8324498)
Autodesk Maya, Motion Builder, p4v and many others
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by stevelaz on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @11:39AM (#8325005)
Although I use git these days and wouldn't go back to P4 if you paid me. I still sometimes use p4merge for my difftool and I always thought they did a great job with their client UI with Qt. So, yay for p4 and Qt.
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by malkia on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @11:56AM (#8325125)
Funny, while I love Qt, and have been using it in our internal tools, there is a old-lore & myths about p4win (the MFC version) of the tool - that always felt snappier than its successor - p4v - and yes, p4win is snappier, but sometimes its just the fact that you've used it for so long, its hard to get without it.

Just about any big game studio uses P4 these days. I haven't seen one that doesn't.

Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by stevelaz on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @01:33PM (#8325730)
"Just about any big game studio uses P4 these days. I haven't seen one that doesn't." That's a very interesting statement. I wonder why? Maybe it's just grandfathered into these companies. IMHO, even if you're an enterprise software shop I think git can handle that with the proper tools and practices.

I'm currently having to use Accurev in an enterprise environment, but I haven't run into anything that Accurev offers that can't be accomplished with git in a better and faster way. But then again, that's just my opinion :-)

Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by georgemcbay on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @02:16PM (#8326030)
P4, as much as there are aspects of it I hate, handles the situation where you have binary files in the repo much better than most source code control systems do... especially git which sucks at that[1]. Game companies tend to have potentially quite large (by SCCS standards) binary assets mixed in with the code or even when they are cleanly separated, they like to have the standardization of everyone using the same version control system instead of having something separate for the artists.

([1] Predictably someone will probably want to respond to this with some link that shows a complicated and non-intuitive way in which you can get git to be halfway reasonable with handling binary files, though this will just prove my point more than disprove it, when compared to P4 which just handles binary files great out of the box with no thinking or planning required).

Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by stevelaz on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @02:45PM (#8326227)
Maybe my google skills aren't as good as others, but can you tell me in what way p4 handles binary files better than git?

I'm not trying to start a flame war, I'm seriously curious.

Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by georgemcbay on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @05:33PM (#8327234)
Every time you make a change to a binary file, git will make a copy of the entire thing and attempt to compress it (despite the fact that it may already be compressed as part of the file format and won't compress any further). And because of the distributed nature of git this means each client is going to have who-knows-how-many perhaps barely different versions of each binary asset, which could be megabytes to hundreds of megabytes in length per version and woe be unto anyone who has to clone the repository for the first time when coming into the project (be prepared to wait hours, maybe days).

There are various git methodologies and projects (eg. git-annex) aimed at working around this but by default git just wasn't designed to deal with big repos full of big files.

Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by stevelaz on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @10:02PM (#8328116)
OK, I get it. The hashing would become slow on each file (especially large ones). And given that git is designed to give you the whole repo history, yes, cloning would be slow with repos with a lot of history.

It seems like 2 of the main reasons Perforce works better with binary files is that when you sync, you only get the version you're requesting, thus resulting in faster downloads and there's an option to disable compression.

According to their website: http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.current/manuals/p4guide... Binary files are stored compressed as well. (I assume that there's an option to disable this)

Thanks for the response and information.

Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by georgemcbay on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @06:29AM (#8329359)
Yes that's exactly correct. On the client-side P4 basically only really cares about the current version (or whatever branched/changelisted revision you are working with) which for projects with a lot of files (especially binary files) will be an incredibly smaller set of data than the full history. git is fully distributed with all of the pros and cons that come with that.
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by heeen on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @11:23AM (#8324934)
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by lmm on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @11:46AM (#8325051)
Qt is a GUI framework - it's useless on the web (well, except as a way to learn good UI practice). It's probably the best non-web UI framework I've ever used, on any platform, in any language (its Python support in particular is superb). If I were to write another native desktop application I can't think of anything I'd rather use.
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by thejdude on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @01:19PM (#8325623)
AFAIK Qt is much more than a GUI framework, and even modular these days, so you could leave out the GUI parts if you want. So you can use all kinds of Qt libs for different things, probably even for building a web server.

Whether you WANT to write a web app in C++ is an entirely different matter, of course.

Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by maelys on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @10:40AM (#8324680)
I think different frameworks are more popular in different spheres, and yes - I don't really see Qt as being one of the most common frameworks mentioned for web work.

That said, I wrote the backend to provide HTML5 video over websockets using Qt for my company.

Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by tellarin on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @10:33AM (#8324647)
Guess web is not its circle. ;)

I've used in software for multiplatform oil and gas data analysis and visualisation. I've left the company many years ago, but they still use it heavily.

Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by shmerl on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @05:05PM (#8327115)
Probably not. If you would have interacted with any mobile or desktop Linux developers (especially KDE ones) you would have met more of those who use Qt.
Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by shortsightedsid on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @02:31PM (#8326132)
I'm one of those 800000+ devs. I like QT with it's Slots and Signals!

I've used it mainly on embedded platforms for UI.

Re:The Qt Company Introduces a Unified Website by 72deluxe on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @04:50AM (#8329130)
Isn't signals and slots just a neat way of doing function pointers, the same as every other GUI toolkit that has callbacks?

(Having said that, it was a simple concept and easy to grasp)