[boost] Re: boost Windowing Toolkit

From: Dave Abrahams (abrahams_at_[hidden])
Date: 1999-12-12 20:22:38

Greg calmly elucidated:
> I don't doubt this is great stuff -- but is enough better than Qt to spend
> time on, or would be be better off leveraging that already popular and
> almost free work?
>
> For those who may not know, Qt is the C++ windowing toolkit underlying the
> Linux KDE desktop.  See http://www.troll.no/qt/ and http://www.kde.org/.
>

Well, as far as boost is concerned, I think Qt is really inappropriate.
Instead of using namespaces they're using a Q prefix on all names. Instead
of using the standard library they're using their own collection classes.
Finally, it requires some sort of meta-object "compiler" outside of C++,
which I think generates C++ source code. We really do have all the tools we
need right here at home, I think.

An important feature of what I'm proposing is that it would be easily ported
to environments without an underlying windowing system (e.g. GGI, which
we've already got something working on). I don't think Qt fits this
description. Also, I don't think they really got the architecture right.

But ultimately, your question is a good one. Can we do something that is
enough better than existing work to be worth spending time on? I have not
been very impressed with the GUI toolkits I've seen out there. In contrast,
I've been very impressed with the work done "at" boost.org. I think we can
do much better. It remains to be seen whether the interest is there.

-Dave