Qt versus Glut

[ibsta]

Qt is a gui development toolkit for C++. It offers sliders, menus, buttons i.e. a complete qui system. It is analagous to MFC. Qt also offers a wrapper for openGL applications, thus enabling openGL applications to listen to events, add keyoard interactivity, etc. Advantage is that one can create the same gui for linux/windows/mac.


GLUT is a toolkit for OpenGL. It is freely available and provide event handling etc etc for openGL. It also has the advantage of cross-platformability.

What I am wondering now is what is better to use:

1) qt, for a single license of $1000+
2) GLUT?

(btw, I want to create openGL applications. If you could provide any performance comparisons, that would be gr8)

thnx


What I am wonder

[FlySim]

Check out fltk (http://www.fltk.org/). Full GUI, cross platform and OpenGL windows. I use it for a CAD application I am developing and have no complaints.

-J.R.

[vjvj]

I'm not so sure you can really compare the two... QT is (like you stated) designed to be a cross platform "MFC" so to speak. Glut is much more lightweight.

So it really comes down to what you want to do. If you need menus and sliders and checkboxes and stuff, Glut isn't going to cut it for you. So you'll need to either purchase the license for QT or look for something else. There was another thread recently where we discussed alternative windowing toolkits, if you do a search for "GLGooey" you should find it.

If you don't need all those features, you don't really need QT although I would still advise against using Glut. Some people here may disagree with me but I don't think I'd use Glut in a shipping product since it is old and kinda slow. You may want to take a look at SDL or GLFW (http://glfw.sourceforge.net/).

[ibsta]

Yeah, just googled my way through. Man, are there some gui toolkit wars, on slashdot, everywhere.
After thorough research, I've decided the two I will be using, depending on the type of project are fltk, very efficient, and wxWindows, very thorough.
TC