aqtinstall VS Slint

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

As an anecdote, the three top contributors to sixtyfps are ex-Qt people. I think it is not anecdotal that there is at least some degree of overlap and competition between Rust and C++, and that this is a market that surely The Qt Company is watching.

SixtyFPS (https://sixtyfps.io/) is in progress for Rust, but it is still early days. It also does not technically use a native toolkit (it uses Qt), but I believe that might be on roadmap. For traditional GUI apps, I think the lack of a table or tree widget is the most limiting for the time being. They have stated they intend to remedy that.

The most promising GUI hasn't been posted here, SixtyFPS. It's in it's early stages and not FOSS, but it's built by some ex-QT cats and has a lot of potential.

People have been recommending https://sixtyfps.io/ to me.

There is already a project to make a Qt like GUI toolkit in Rust: https://sixtyfps.io/ It is really similar to Qt https://sixtyfps.io/releases/0.1.5/docs/rust/sixtyfps/index.html

People are doing that too. https://sixtyfps.io/ is basically a Qt clone in Rust, actually developed by previous Qt developers.

spdlog, a pretty useful and more and more commonly used logging library for C++.\ SixtyFPS, an emerging GUI library for Rust, but you can use it in multiple languages. It uses OpenGL or Qt currently as backend (well, it's a new library and they wanted two from the get-go to make sure their abstractions are done right/well enough). They started a company this year for it too.

Just so some are not aware, there's a new project called sixtyfps by some people who were in the Qt world for long. I didn't take a deep dive into it but it looks promising.