Bjørn Roald wrote:
Andy Little said:
"Vladimir Prus" <ghost@cs.msu.su> wrote
Failing that, anybody has any killer idea for GUI development that warrants new library? Why don't add Qt to the C++ standard?
No doubt, TrollTech has to make the money they deserve some way. They also give the stuff away to everybody that can accept GPL like terms.
What I wonder is if anybody with contacts in the standard process and/or to the compiler vendors have ever considered Vladimirs suggestion, and approached the Trolls about it? Maybe there is a business case in that for TrollTech. They could be the prime provider of a larger part of the standard library to a number of compilers.
This would be the right way to go about producing a standard GUI library. As Volodya has noted, writing a GUI library suffers from several problems: * the task is monumentally large; * everyone has a different idea on what should go into the library (just see the native vs generic look brought up in this round of GUI library discussions!); * the library would vastly increase the size of Boost (if Boost would be used to host the GUI).
I believe the main problem is that some of the compiler vendors have their own none-portable GUI libraries - are they willing to give these up, or make them portable and give them away? That is why this would not work - so don't blame the pricing of commercial licenses of Qt.
Having Qt standardised does not mean that people will stop using wxWidgets, WTL, MFC or another GUI library, just like having std::basic_string<> hasn't stopped ATL/MFC, wx and others providing their own string classes. - Reece