Re: Newbie seeks guidance

[Katie Lucas <katie@fysh.org>]

On Sun, Nov 21, 2004 at 05:39:28PM -0600, John Moore wrote:
> Although I'll probably tend toward QT for cards/chess (since I'm familiar
> with QT), I do appreciate all the advice I've been given. I was a little
> hesitant to stick with Linux because I'd prefer not to have to switch
> platforms; I'd like to focus on the games. So I'm pleased to hear ANY
> suggestions, including libraries,tools,etc that'll come in handy later.
> Thanks all!

Qt definitely appears to work cross platform -- we're using it
commercially. However there are some "gotchas" that mean things won't
"just work" if you pick Linux Qt code up and try and use it on Windows.

The big one that got us is that apparently in Windows DLLs, the
addresses of protected and private members aren't exported. So you
can't declare class X in library and descend class Y from it in
library Y, because Y can't now access the protected members (data or
methods) of X... it compiles, it just doesn't link. We gave up trying
to argue about this with the compilers and compiled the entire
application into one big exe... the trouble then is that the
"designerplugin" classes which install the classes into the "build by
name" system don't get called so you have to hand-roll that...

We also had real problems convincing qmake to make a mingw32
compatible makefile. Although it's supposed to work and is supported,
it just did not want to play ball. We could have called tech support, but the flakiness of the results worried me, so again, we gave up, went the easy
route and installed a copy of VC++...

None of these are showstoppers, but they could be annoying.

Of course, if anyone knows how to fix any of the above...