Tetromino weblog

Brad Hards Brad Hughes* of Trolltech says that future versions of Qt4 (perhaps as soon as Qt4.2) will start using the Glib event dispatch loop. This is downright wonderful news for a couple of reasons. The technical reason is that you will be able to use binary Qt4 plugins in Glib/Gtk apps and vice versa — so you would be able to use both GnomeVFS in KDE, kioslaves in Gnome, Arthur canvas in The Gimp, integrate Filelight with Nautilus… The fact is, on the Linux desktop, some Gtk/Gnome and Qt/KDE duplicate a lot of work. Sometimes the way KDE does something is better, sometimes the way Gnome does it is better. With the new event dispatcher, KDE4 and future Gnome apps will be a lot more free to call each others’ APIs.

And the second reason is politics. There is too much of a “not invented here” syndrome going on. People are afraid of using Glib outside of the Gnome universe for fear of being rejected by Qt purists, and end up making a half-assed clone of pieces of Glib for their project. Making Qt4 depend on Glib will fix a lot of this sort of bullshit.

* It was an honest mistake — there is a Brad Hards at KDE, a Brad with no last name on his blog at Trolltech, so I kind of assumed they were the same guy… Sorry. Anyway, apparently I was not the only one to mix up the Brads.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 25th, 2006 at 2:59 and is filed under tech reference. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.