I am loving cross-platform development with Qt, it’s robust and logical and leads to amazing native desktop apps. Before getting started, I expected that there would be lots of platform-specific hackery required, and going cross-platform would slow down the end product by 20-30%. But Qt is so reliable, and well-laid-out, and provides so much more than just lowest-common-denominator functionality, that I’m finding it to be much faster than, e.g., developing a desktop app with C# or Java.<\/p>\n
Another reason it is giving me leverage: [n] compilers are better than one.<\/p>\n
I just hit a bug in Visual Studio with some STL code. My comparison operator was throwing up because one of the objects in the array I was searching had bad data. But you wouldn’t know it from Visual Studio, giving me an iterator error in their STL code, with no stack trace:<\/p>\n
__thiscall _Lockit::~_Lockit()\r\n\t{\t\/\/ unlock the mutex\r\n\tif (_Locktype < MAX_LOCK)\r\n\t\t_Mtxunlock(&mtx[_Locktype]); <- HERE\r\n\t}<\/code><\/pre>\nI spent some time trying to isolate the upstream cause - I could have spent hours - until I had an inspiration: this kind of unhelpful compiler error information happens in just about every compiler I've used, about 5% of the time - but it happens in different ways in different compilers. So I fired up the code in Qt Creator in OS X, and gcc showed me the error along with the line of code where the array search had begun. Bingo. Then I started looking through the values in the debugger, to find the bad data. But again, I realized that Visual Studio has much better unwinding of debug variables in its debugger, so I looked up the line of code there, set a breakpoint, stepped over it and confirmed that was where I was getting the error - yep! Then I could easily dig way down into my debug variables in style.<\/p>\n
Moral is: don't forget to take full advantage of each of your tools. Save the headbanging for concerts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am loving cross-platform development with Qt, it’s robust and logical and leads to amazing native desktop apps. Before getting started, I expected that there would be lots of platform-specific hackery required, and going cross-platform would slow down the end product by 20-30%. But Qt is so reliable, and well-laid-out, and provides so much more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[22,7,19,10],"tags":[170,119,172,28],"class_list":["post-1520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cpp","category-hangthedj","category-opensource","category-tricks-tips-tools","tag-c","tag-cross-platform","tag-java","tag-qt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t