I'm very interested to hear your opinion on WxWidgets, as I have heard more desktop app devs endorse it over the years. What features makes QT win out over it?
Also, I know this might sound crazy, but what about (f/m)asm?
Also, I know this might sound crazy, but what about (f/m)asm?
It uses the native UI so fits in better with OSes, whereas Qt ones stand out to me (you can see the buttons aren't native). I did a lot of stuff that was "owner drawn" so reimplemented OnPaint to draw things myself for custom-look controls.
wxWidgets dropped its ODBC support a few years back so talking to databases likely needs another library. Also the ports/HTTP section of it isn't massively useful so I use libCurl instead.
Despite the bugs, it is quick to build and I found working with it enjoyable. Some controls (like the wxDataViewCtrl I think) were really slow so I wrote my own; the OpenGL wrapper works alright but I had to put some work into forcing it to resize; basically be prepared to put some work in - but it is rewarding. I like the layout mechanism - makes other systems like MFC look poor!
You can build wxWidgets and force it to use the STL for its container classes etc; Qt appears to implement everything again instead of just using the existing STL I think.
The developers are helpful and the forum is useful, at least for basic problems. I enjoy(ed) using it anyway.
I don't know what (f/m)asm is in this context, sorry.
I think Qt wins in all other domains though. Documentation, extensiveness and quality of the non-GUI stuff, etc.
But not having native widgets kinda sucks. You can see that when you make that compromise, the question comes why not to use Electron (which is a competitor of those two in reality).