I feel like writing a (rich) text editor mainly to be used for note-taking, in either C or C++, using most probably GTK or Qt for the UI.
The problem is that I can't really decide what to use. I know both C and C++, C a little better. I've never used Qt but I'm completely fine with learning, and I have some experience with GTK.
Is there any particular combination you would give preference to and why? In particular, do you think there is any advantage to using C++, or will C do just fine?
I'm writing an editor myself, and I too have choose C++ and Qt.
The reasons for this:
C++ is CPU- and memory-efficient. I hate slow text editors with a passion.
Supporting libraries are almost always written in C or C++, so I can interface nicely with them (and extend them if needed).
Qt is a great, well supported, cross-platform/-system GUI library, and it contains a lot of generally useful base classes/algorithms. It makes C++ actually fun to use.
Personally, I would go for C++/Qt.
The reason for my bias is that unlike GTK, Qt is not only a UI toolkit, but provides a lot of other features like networking, database access, xml parsing... which could benefit you a lot. And all that with a consistent API.
The main fault of Qt is that it is a replacement for standard C++ library in a sense that it has its own list, string, map, hash... classes. Those have much nicer API than STL and are (IMO) much more pleasant to work with, but if you learn C++ this way, it will be much more difficult to return to standard C++ if you ever need to.
If you want a gentle introduction to OOP with C++ and Qt, see this book (free to download):
http://cartan.cas.suffolk.edu/oopdocbook/
C++ is probably, better suited for RAD (Rapid Application Development) than C. This is because of its additional features such as classes and objects. C I think would just handicap you because, you do not have some stuff like classes and objects.
Usually, OO languages are suited for GUIs and what not whereas, languages like C are for low-level driver stuff where efficiency is of great importance (even though its a little debatable).
C++ is a better C. C++ can do whatever C can do and in addition supports object-oriented and generic-programming design paradigms. 'SUPPORT' here means the language itself and the facilities around it provide ease, pleasure and productivity for the programmer to achieve these design goals. Go for C++ and you won't regret.
If you choose Qt, you must also choose C++ because Qt is a C++ library. If you are programming a rich text editor, I don't know how much it's left for you to do on top of Qt's text editor which well supports rich text. You probably only need to concentrate on adding domain-specific features of your interest.
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I am producing a piece numerical software in C++ and want to add a GUI (mainly for Windows). I know how to produce GUIs using comfortable editors in modern languages like Java or .NET. Now my question is what is the easiest and most comfortable way to add a GUI frontend for my program. In the choice of the tools am completely free (open source and portability would be nice), but please also keep in mind how much boilerplate code and interfaces that have to be maintained are required if the GUI is implemented in another language (Like C#).
Please don't suggest switching the whole project from C++! And note that the program does not require not much interaction between the C++ code and the GUI.
The statements about ISO C++ in this answer's comments are poorly edited. None of the solutions presented here would impose on the computational code a requirement of changing to a different dialect of C++. The GUI code itself might be another story.
The answers about using Windows Forms with managed C++ are probably the most practical. A lot of the UI-related code would be in a dialect (extension) of C++ where the .NET-garbage-collected pointers would be living alongside the traditional ISO C++ pointers. I haven't used this method but from what I read it might be better than what I have used.
MFC might be more practical if you don't want to invest in .NET knowledge for this task. It uses standard C++ constructs to wrap the Windows API. The Windows API uses a particular calling convention which C++ doesn't normally use, and it takes an extension to C++ to work with that, but this is no different than having a C++ program that calls some functions that are extern "C". Visual Studio has a GUI layout tool that is really good at layout of dialogs and at interfacing the dialog widgets to variables that reflect the state of the widgets. I've used this. If you can boil your GUI down to a dialog box then this would be a great option, otherwise you'd be using one of MFC's layout-managed windows.
Obviously the above options do not handle other platforms you might have in mind.
There are also various toolkits that were born on other platforms and have been decently ported to Windows. GTK, QT, FLTK, and WxWindows come to mind. I haven't used any of the dialog-layout/application designer tools that work with those, and I haven't used QT at all. When I last reviewed QT it had a special preprocessing pass for the GUI code. Other than that these portable tool kits are pure ISO C++ as far as I know.
As a really-out-there option one could program to the X Window System protocol using "libx". As far as I know this would involve no non-ISO C++ code.
Qt is a decent choice. It's stable, has a wonderful C++ interface (as opposed to MFC) and has a convenient designer tool.
The overhead of learning it from scratch might however be more that what you're willing to invest. It does have a certain learning curve.
wxWidgets would a good choice for a cross platform GUI for C++
As much as I love C++, it's difficult to build a GUI with. I'd build a quick C# WinForms application which would let you use things like Visual Studio's visual designers (Drag and drop buttons and such), and call your C++ application using P/Invoke.
C++ will often produce smoother and nicer GUIs, but it takes a bit more work out of the box.
If it's going to be just a simple GUI consisting mostly of standard controls I would do it with MFC. It may be outdated and was never really good, but it's still useful to get a native Windows GUI up and running quickly.
I have to chuckle at all the ways to skin this cat. Life is good. My response is a product I manage. XVT can do it for you. The easiest way is let us do it for you or give you a template to get there. It's just a matter of if you have more money than time. Then I'd look at us. It would be the fastest and least amount of effort on your part.
MFC Dialog Based application could answer the needs.
Depending on what you need, there's a nice imgui made by Mikko floating around that you can simply plug-in and use fairly quickly. It's done in opengl though so it won't be your standard windows-gui but it's really small and really easy to work with. You can download r'lyeh's version from here: http://code.google.com/p/colony9/source/browse/include/goo/imgui.h.
That's the easiest and most comfortable way I know, it is dependent on SDL though.
What are my options in terms of a fast functional language for library use in a cross-platform Qt C++ application?
It seems almost all languages (functional or not) have some way of calling C/C++ code in an easy manner. I'd like to go the other way around - write an application in Qt using C++ for stateful business logic, GUIs and stuff but drop down and use a functional language for the core calculation library.
Which ones are easy to use in this manner? Can for instance OCaml code be compiled into a static library and then consumed by a C++ app?
Thanks,
Rickard
Haskell has this capability, though the interaction with Qt/qmake and your build process with ghc may take a little trickery to get working:
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Calling_Haskell_from_C
There is also a project called HaskellDirect which seems similar to your purpose as well:
http://www.haskell.org/hdirect/
AutoCAD uses AutoLisp so my suggestion would be Lisp.
I'd be tempted to check out qtHaskell and to do the whole thing in Haskell. My opinion is based on Don Stewart's remarkable success doing xmonad in Haskell.
Lisp and Haskell are excellent functional languages but if we consider the ease of binding C/C++ code along with the language, I'd recommend lua.
It is extremely straightforward to bind C functions to lua right off the bat, the interpreter is super compact and easy library to build, it's among the fastest scripting languages out there, and, with luabind, you can easily bind C++ classes, template instantiations, etc. I've had to do bindings for numerous scripting languages in the past and I've never found one that's quite as straightforward as lua. It's also supported with swig if you prefer to bind things through swig which will allow your application to support multiple scripting languages.
From a pure language point of view, the meta-feature/metaprogramming aspect of lua (comparable to lisp) makes it very easy to support all kinds of programming paradigms, though I personally find it best suited for functional programming. It's extremely customizable and well-suited for embedded use.
However, since you are already using qt, qtHaskell might be a nice choice to consider as well.
Since I have been mostly using script languages in the past time but now want to go to the "high-performance" level I decided to learn C++ some time ago.
I looked at some "beginner" tutorials and bought an O'reilly C++ pocket reference book (it's really helpful). My problem is that I now know all the basics but I'm not good enought to program a more complicated game, for example, yet.
Do I have to get one of those thick C++ books for further learning?
I'm going to use C++ on Windows mainly. What APIs beside Win32 are important for me?
My goal would be to write a small interpreter for a programming language I've though of - I managed that in several scripting languages already, what API/Library knowledge do I need in C++ to write one?
You don't need a thick book - you need a good one. Get Accelerated C++, written by Koenig & Moo, two of the original C++ development team.
Depends what you want to do.
You don't need anything - you can write a perfectly good interpreter or compiler using just the C++ Standard library. See this SO question for lots of info in this area.
Learn with books. C++ is a complex language. My suggestion is to first go with a rather quick introduction and general overview of the major programming paradigms that C++ supports: OOP and generic programming: Accelerated C++.
When you finish this book, you can go with the two volumes of Bruce Eckel's Thinking in C++ which are very detailed.
For UI programming, the best C++ toolkit is Qt, and it is multiplaform-ready. You can read "C++ GUI Programming With Qt4" (the first edition is free to download, just google it). If you want to stick with C++/Windows API, learn the Windows Template Library, altough it may be a bit hard due to lack of official documentation (altough there are good tutorials on the net). WTL is the way to go to create very small, lightweight applications (Qt DLLs on the other side, need a few MBs each).
I have always found that learning a language from a book is pretty difficult and that after you know the basics you should begin to program. So instead of picking up a thick manual I would check out something like http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial.html#advanced or just google for c++ tutorial and something that you would like to try to make.
A good (and) thin book to get started in C++ is Accelerated C++ by Koenig and Moo.
I mainly do programming under Linux, but I hear a lot of bad things about MFC, so I'd try to find a different GUI library.
Once you get up to speed with some of the more complicated parts of C++ syntax, have a look at the Boost.Spirit libraries for parser generation. The various Boost libraries provide some very useful extensions to the Standard Library.
Honestly, In learning C++ i never picked up a book (no flaming please). The best advice i can give is to go to this page and go through the tutorial. It covers the majority of the C++ language (read: most commonly used features) and keeps it as simple as possible. As far as APIs that are important... well that is a matter of preference. No one toolkit/api has really "won", but Qt, GTK-- (gtkmm), and wxWidgets are all big players. And besides GUIs, you'll probably want to learn either the raw winsock2 and threading APIs OR the boost library's threading and network interfaces. I do agree that MFC is dying, and for windows-only development C# is taking an increasingly large role (even on linux/mono C# is starting to catch on... slowly).
Also, the best way to learn a language is to code. So don't just read a whole ton- without practical experience you're never going to learn the language. Ask questions, answer those you can, and write tutorials- for yourself if nobody else. Writing down what you've learned is a great reference, and the process of straightening everything out in your head to write it down in a fashion that another person can understand it alone is a great way to reinforce concepts. In a strange, but seemingly backwards, way I found the best way I learn programming is by helping other people with their questions.
#Neil- i disagree that online tutorials are "flat out wrong". If anything, the style they teach you might be geared towards readability rather than optimization- which in-my-not-so-humble-opinion is an advantage. In my limited experience I've found cplusplus.com a go-to reference for pretty much everything.
Specifically, to answer your questions:
1. No thick book needed. I've heard that the thinner ones can be useful as a quick reference, though.
It's completely subjective and depends on your goal. Boost's network and multithreading libraries are probably a good start.
between std::string, std::stringstream, and getline(std::istream&, std::string&) you should be pretty good. C++ comes with a whole ton of built-in functionality yet isn't too bloated/huge/impossible to learn. Take advantage of it. All of the parsing is built in already.
Please, for Pete's sake, don't use directly use the Win32 API. You'll be painting yourself in the Microsoft corner. There are plenty of cross-platform libraries out there you can use instead:
Standard C++ library: strings, file i/o, containers, algorithms
Boost for the everyday stuff they left out of the standard library: parsing, networking, threading, smart pointers, memory pools, date/time, matrices, etc... Boost libraries are peer-reviewed before being accepted and are high-quality. Boost is the breeding ground for libraries that eventually become part of the next C++ standard.
GUI Toolkits: Qt and wxWidgets are very mature and widely used. There are many more.
For C++ on windows, definitely learn Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC). Without MFC, you have to implmenet all of the windows API stuff yourself, which is more C than C++ and can be quite a pain.
You also may want to get, learn, and use the boost C++ libraries. They aren't windows specific, but they are a great resource for anyone.
I highly recommend Stroustrup's Intro C++ book. It covers C++ and STL in a very approachable way.
After that you might consider looking into books on Qt, a multi-platform GUI toolkit, or WTL or MFC for Windows. You could do .NET + C++, but that would be a lot to learn. In my experience with Qt and MFC, books have not helped much. Tampering with sample apps, building small apps just to test out one kind of feature, and poking around the docs was the only way I could get my head around either library. The books I had tended to simply gloss over too much--they were not worth the money.
As well-known, C++ has steeper learning curve than most of the mainstream languages, which results in better performance . But, does using C++ over other languages[like Java,Ruby,Python] for Qt development have still (major) advantages,let's say about Qtopia? If any, what are they?
Qt is natively a C++ API, so any other languages have to have wrapper code around it which needs to be maintained, etc. The primary documentation will also be for the C++ API.
I'm not sure if there are any "official" bindings to other languages which are maintained and released together with Qt.
If you are looking at Qtopia, you are probably looking into embedded systems. In that case, C++ will likely be the one you want to choose, specifically for those performance reasons.
Otherwise, Trolltech maintains a Java binding, and I imagine that some of the other language bindings aren't too bad either, since those languages can interact directly with c/c++ code. However, those bindings are likely to always be a little out of date.
it's easier to create a single executable.
don't know if that will be for long...
I am a C# programmer who started using ubuntu about 2 years ago. I'm wanting to learn GUI programming in either C or C++. I don't really like mono, it tends to crash on my system. I have a basic understanding of C++. I have never worked in C, but it looks cool. Which toolkit should I learn/use? Give Pro/Cons of each. Thanks!
I could be accused of bias since I do help contribute to gtkmm, but I was a user first, so... In any case, I would highly recommend gtkmm if you're comfortable with C++. Memory management is much easier with gtkmm than with GTK+ because reference-counted objects are managed automatically with smart pointers. You can also instantiate objects as auto variables (e.g. on the stack) and have their lifetime determined by their scope. So in practice, it's much easier to avoid memory leaks with gtkmm than with GTK+.
Another huge advantage of gtkmm over GTK+ (in my opinion) is the use of a type-safe signals framework. In GTK+, you constantly need to pass things as void pointers and then cast them around to the type you think they should be. In gtkmm, you dont need to do this, and can take advantage of the compiler enforcing type-safety on your signal handlers.
Another big advantage over C/GTK+ is the ease of deriving new classes. In GTK+, you need to write a lot of boilerplate code and basically re-implement things that you get for free in C++ as part of the language (e.g. inheritance, constructors, destructors, etc). This is more tedious and error-prone.
greyfade mentioned that gtkmm is incomplete, and he's right to a certain extent -- gtkmm does not cover absolutely everything in the GTK+ API (though it gets awfully close). But in practice this is not a problem because you can always use the C/GTK+ API directly from your gtkmm code. This C compatibility is a huge advantage of C++ over something like C# or python bindings where you would have no alternatives if the binding didn't cover part of the API.
The only real reasons to choose GTK+ over gtkmm (IMO) are that gtkmm has a little additional overhead since it is a wrapper on top of the C library (but this is generally just a single function call, which is going to have negligible impact), or if you hate or can't use C++.
If you're a C# programmer, why don't you take a look at Vala?
I use pygtk for most of my Linux GUI applications, but Python was simply too slow for the project I'm working on right now, so I was trying to pick one of GTK+ and GTKmm. Then I met Vala.
It's a pretty new language, and therefore documentation is pretty limited at the moment, but I think it has the best of both worlds: C# syntax with C speed.
Since C++ is more familiar to you, you may find GTKmm to be a better fit, since you can use idioms like RAII. Unfortunately, GTKmm is a little incomplete and is missing a few of the lesser-used parts of GTK.
GTK+ on its own, however, essentially exposes an object model similar to what you find in C++, but with only C functions. Things like construction and destruction in C++ are done explicitly in the C API and instances of widgets are handled via pointers exclusively.
Try both and see which fits your project better.
Like many have said, Gtkmm does provide you with good memory management, reference counted objects, etc. It does fall down in one department, though. Documentation. The whole of the Gtkmm project suffers from the "undocumentation" phenomena, where the posted (and reposted on 3rd party sites) documentation is simply a javadoc scan of the header files.
Just wanted you to know what you'd be getting into. For instance, the Scrolled Window is one of the better documented classes in Gtkmm.
I would suggest to learn vala with gedit.
http://www.valaide.org/doku.php : vala
https://launchpad.net/valable : Eclipse
http://code.google.com/p/vtg/ : Gedit
http://abderrahim.arablug.org/blog/ : anjuta
I think the best way to go would be first learn gtkmm! After you are done with the basics of gtkmm, GTK+ should be fairly straightforward to learn(provided you know C and are comfortable with pointers).
In case you don't know C, you can learn it quickly by reading The C Programming Language by Dennis Ritchie
I recommend you to learn gtkmm first because it is specially designed for C++, which is somewhat similar to C# since both are Object Oriented, so gtkmm will be relatively easy to learn first than GTK+.
After gtkmm, you can move on to GTK+
Most of the open source companies use GTK+ rather than gtkmm, so GTK+ is worthwile to learn!
Have you looked at Qt?
It's nice C++ design, cross platform and LGPL