On site development and Qt

Recently I had a chance to develop some applications on site. I used the greatly-productive Qt and Qt Creator, Application was built in an instant, and result was satisfactory. But the experience remained me some uncomfortable memory.

Except for skeleton codes, I put only 10 to 20 lines. I had to find out DLLs with more than 20MB, put them all to USB thumb drive, and I put the drive to PCs here and there. In each run I had to wait for 2~3 seconds more after starting running, and the delay became a burden as I repeated the job.

On Windows, Qt initiates DirectX and OpenGL, regardless of whether those modules are actually used in the application of not. My application was based fully on Qt Widgets and GDI, so that there's no way DirectX or OpenGL would be involved, but Qt initialized those stuff anyway. And to initialize, you have to wait for two or three seconds. If your system was already using those that's no problem, but in office environment, chances are that they'll be used only when you play video games, avoiding eyes of your boss.

Of course if the application is big enough to show splash screen saying "WAIT!" waiting for two or three seconds is no problem, but for apps quickly developed on site and run instantly, it's like forever - when you're busy and quick-tempered, chances are that you hit enter key a lot of times, resulting in starting a lot of instances at once, delaying the actual start more than ever(well, sometimes you experience Windows eats your keyboard or mouse input. don't you?).

Nowadays I feel that the high productivity and abundant features of Qt has its own tradeoff - e.g. performance issue(not only startup time, but also performance of features, like QLinkedList against similar others) and shared library. Of course in Linux the situation can be different, but in Windows it has its own story(if you're a GTK user that's yet another different story, but it's out of scope as for now).

Anyway, after experiencing this and that, I moved again from Qt to wxWidgets. I love the instant startup at cold start and freely available static link thanks to its license policy, resulting in easier deployment. There are, of course, some(expected) productivity losses or features not existing, but it can be overcome with the power of will(.....) and my own development.

I don't want to open the flame - Qt is really a great product and I totally agree. But there's no such thing as one size that fits to all. For some time being, I'll have fun with my wxWidgets and Code::Blocks.