aqtinstall VS Avalonia.FuncUI

I've used aqt[1] before but it doesn't look like it's seeing 5.15.11 yet, just 5.15.2.

[1]: https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall

Don't use the Qt installer. It sucks. It's only reason is to annoy people and collect your data. Use aqt: https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall

I mostly disagree. Like you said, Qt is the best native GUI toolkit available today. And that is a hard achievement. There are many tradeoffs (some you pointed out) but the open source community seems to find a way around those limitations. There are thousands of open source libraries you can plug-in into your Qt app to overcome many of its limitations (although some remain, like how can't we still not easily change caret/cursor color of QTextEdit??).

Unlike you, I like the direction where Qt is taking. I think QML and Qt Quick are great. I just implemented a feature in my note-taking app that turns Markdown text into Kanban board using QML and the experience has been great (https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes/pull/574). I'm planning to continue transition from QWidgets to QML/Qt Quick.

I do worry of the continuous friction with open source development and hate the online installers as well. I can recommend this useful tool https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall that allows you to easily download prebuilt Qt binaries. I hope they can revert their approach on that.

Install the qt binaries from the command line https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall

https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall will help you with that.

you can install it from vcpkg or conan (or https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall if you really want the official Qt binaries) and it'll be much less

Is there any particular reason why you want to build Qt yourself? This is usually quite painful and requires a lot of extra stuff (see https://wiki.qt.io/Building\_Qt\_6\_from\_Git) . If you just want to avoid the (horrible) official installer and a Qt account, you can use aqtinstaller to fetch everything you need: https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall

Just recently, I had to recompile a (singleplayer) save game editor. So basically a GUI that does some clever hex editing.

It was written in C++ using Qt.

Have you ever tried compiling a Qt program on Windows? It involves signing up for an official Qt developer account to even install qmake.

To the point I had to use an unofficial Qt installer CLI app (aqtinstall) [0] to even install the toolchain to build this little shitty app... which still relied on having several Qt .dll files in the same directory as the .exe to work.

Have you clicked on [0] yet? Well, then guess what programming language aqtinstall uses.

[0] https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall

For those interested in .NET languages with alternative compilation targets, Elmish (https://elmish.github.io/elmish/) is pretty unique.

We use F# on the front end (instead of TS), and thanks to the Fable compiler (which transpiles F# to JS, Python, Dart, PHP and Rust), most of the benefits of an Elm-style model in the UI can be ported to all sorts of different outputs languages. The rust target is in beta, but its promising because the WASM bundle size stands to be dramatically lower.

While the default is reactivity library for Elmish is React, you can swap in Avalonia/FuncUI (https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI) pretty easily as well.

The code to declare/build the widgets is quite nice. Modifying widgets by hand on certain signals or manually re-wiring all the signals seems a bit outdated to me.

Wonder if something like FuncUI [1] could be built on top of it.

[1] https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI

OTOH, if desktop really is the primary focus, and if you can drop the idea of reusable UI code, then Avalonia is a great choice for F# as you can use a Avalonia.FuncUI and/or Elmish.Avalonia.

And one more MVU for you https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI

You might want to check out Avalonia.FuncUI, which lets you use F# and the cross-platform Avalonia framework to build desktop applications with an Elm-like architecture: https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI#example-using-...