I may have been a little harsh on the GUI toolkits available in Linux. Yesterday evening I started playing with Qt4 and, while the moc is still there, it’s a very easy toolkit to use.

The moc (meta object compiler) is pretty unobtrusive and in fact it’s only a matter of calling qmake a couple of times to sort it all out. After that using Qt is very similar to the Java paradigm: extend a generic widget for the frame and then add a container widget to set a layout and add all other widgets to that. Adding a menu is just as easy (and in fact easier than it was with previous Qt versions).

It’s not as easy as Visual C++ but it’s not terribly difficult.