aqtinstall VS Crow

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

I'm investigating using C++ to build a REST server, and would love to know of people's experiences with Crow-- or whether they would recommend something else as a "medium-level" abstraction C++ web server. As background, I started off experimenting with Python/FastAPI, which is great, but there is too much friction to translate from pybind11-exported C++ objects to the format that FastAPI expects, and, of course, there are inherent performance limitations using Python, which could impact scaling up if the project were to be successful.

How about Crow?

https://github.com/CrowCpp/Crow is super easy to use

I recommend Crow, it's a web framework that supports HTTP and Websockets. It's a bit larger than being only there to just let you compose or decode a packet. But I'm pretty sure everything you mentioned is there already :)

It's also very useful to get to grips with using some popular libraries. Some might be ones that you'll find yourself using everywhere (e.g. fmt, spdlog, catch2), and some that have more specific usage, but are good to try out and explore what C++ can do in a ridiculously easy-to-use manner (e.g. crow, Dear ImGui). Make some toy projects that use some of these and you'll learn a lot.

I've been working on Crow for quite a while now, it's a pretty cool framework IMO.

Crow

You can also consider https://crowcpp.org/.