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Having a major project in Qt 15 years ago under my belt I can't disagree more. The project started with Qt 2 and at some point migrated to to Qt 3 in half a day. KDE is written in Qt and frankly if it was not a good option that experiment wouldn't have succeeded so far given that the amount of commercial support is a fraction the one GNOME receives. (Yea I know - citation required).

The quirks in Qt are coming form the fact that was trying and still tries to implement a sane C++ dialect and build system (qmake) in a time where the standardization efforts of C++ and event STL was not at the same level of today. For example So now we Boost for signal and slots. Do we still need moc? The same for collections, maps etc. When they go introduced there was no standard / portable solution.

You can probably describe Qt like the C++ equivalent of the java promise (write once - compile everywhere) with its own support for sockets, filesystem and what else abstraction you can imagine off.

Qt was an impressive feat for its time and a joy to program for. Much better than what the web was at the time with is amalgam of languages and text only interfaces. It took web and flexbox up to 2015 to be able to implement the holy grail layout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_grail_(web_design) .




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