[fpc-devel] Qt, Java and Unicode support

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 4:01 PM, Marco van de Voort <marcov at stack.nl> wrote:
>
> I can only guess about QT's reasons. In Kylix times I  once heard a rumour
> that QT was mostly modeled after NT's api philosophy, to make it programmers
> easier to migrate.

I have never heard that and can't think that's it's true. The Qt API
is quite different. Plus the original designers didn't come from a
Windows platform.

Take this quotation for example: "The toolkit was called Qt because
the letter Q looked appealing in Haavard's Emacs font, and "t" was
inspired by Xt, the X toolkit."  ― "A Brief History of Qt" at
http://safari.oreilly.com/0131872494/pref04

Plus Qt was first announced on comp.os.linux.announce which from the
name you can guess is not Windows related.

So based on the whole history of Qt article, I don't see anything
Windows related in there...  ;-)

> (it was said that was also why CG chose it instead of
> GTK, though I can imagine GTK bugs also could have been a (more) major
> reason)

I heard the Qt model was easer to apply to VCL than the GTK model. And
the quote below seems to agree with that.  And you might have a point
about the GTK bugs. ;-)

"Much analysis and debate was had over GTK vs QT as the underlying
drawing and widget lib because unlike Windows, Linux had/has a
fractured UI community and there certainly wasn't a GDI or native
controls on Linux, unless you used Wine which we decided to use for
porting parts of our IDE, but not for development or end user apps.
There are good reasons for going either way, in the end we chose QT
because we liked where KDE was going and felt it was closer to the
Win32/GDI direction and therefore cleaner to wire up to VCL." ―
http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/kylix_inside.html


Regards,
  - Graeme -


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