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Comment by qtzfz | Hacker News Reader

Qt is not bad but it's also not as good as Electron. It doesn't look native (unless you're myopic), it's slower than native, it's quirky, it's buggy... it's cross-platform on paper because when you manage to build your app on another platform you'll see half of it doesn't work well... and on top of that, it costs money. A lot of money. No wonder it lost.

On one hand I understand it's good to have competition. On the other, I'm happy that bad solutions lose. That's the way of the market.

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Why bring Electron? Qt doesn't look exactly native, and it is a bit slower than native, but Electron doesn't look native at all and is much slower.

Qt is kind of a middle ground between low level / native frameworks and web based interfaces like Electron.

And in the majority of the cases, it doesn't cost money. The open source version is LGPL, which means you can use it for free in proprietary software as long as you allow the user to modify the Qt library you are using (usually, in means dynamic linking).

Just release your own thing as open source, then Qt doesn't cost anything at all.

That's one way of looking at it, but remember that Electron is better and free even if you don't release your code. On mobile, you have Flutter, React Native... In this situation, why would anybody want to go with Qt, unless they have an existing, legacy codebase? Who's starting new projects in Qt?

Electron is better if your only metric to evaluate quality is "can I use it in my proprietary product?".

I work in a company that uses electron. The amount of time the UI guys spend to reimplement things that are already in Qt is incredible (for example a portable tray icon, menus, tabbing).

Yes we are saving money on license (but spending probably much more on developers reimplementing things).

> Who's starting new projects in Qt?

People who want portability and are aware that not everybody has 32GB of RAM like their overly expensive developer machine?

People that do not feel like reimplementing things that have existed for ages is fun?

People who do open source and do not have to pay for a license, and thus have no reason to "save money" and use electron?

I second this. On the projects where I work, I see a lot of 117 reinventions of square wheels, with their accompanying bugs, for things like multi-column lists, scroll, selection models, and drop-downs. And I know we used to have those things as built-in standard-widgets, where you had to put in extra effort, in order to F them up.

I have an open bug registered on the aurelia framework concerning virtual scroll sometimes breaks when you reach the edges. The answer from the maintainer could be translated to "the guys who understood this code is no longer here". I tried to figure it out from the source code, and came to the same conclusion.

It's as if, ever since we got a full set of widgets available on desktops, we have been busy re-inventing them from scratch in other idioms (notably in the HTML DOM.)

This. It is incredibly easy to underestimate the functionality in a fully-fledged widget set, especially once you factor in accessibility integrations. UI development is 10% shiny, 90% edge-case.

I don't think LGPL requires you to release your source code if you link dynamically and not modify the LGPL code itself.

Yes you're right. Doing it open source works but it's not even necessary.

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