Creating GUI - Is it cheating?

[Hi P]

Creating a program GUI by using a designer such as QT saves so much time, but feels like it's the wrong thing to do... as if I were cheating.

 

Is it better to just code everything from scratch?

 

Thank you

[Mira Yurizaki]

You could argue if you're using anything other than Notepad, nano, or similar, you're cheating.

 

Use whatever tools makes your life easier. If anyone else says otherwise they're just salty 

 

EDIT: There are some reasons for programmatically adding the GUI elements, but for the most part, figure out what works for your situation.

[Unimportant]

4 minutes ago, Hi P said:

Creating a program GUI by using a designer such as QT saves so much time, but feels like it's the wrong thing to do... as if I were cheating.

 

Is it better to just code everything from scratch?

 

Thank you

No, there's nothing wrong with using a visual design tool.

 

No one is interested in tons of boilerplate code that does nothing but setup a window and some controls. Doing it manually is a pain to create and maintain.

 

[wasab]

Using autocorrect features for an essay would also be cheating then. 

[rickymohk]

You should care more about performance than cheating while using libraries or frameworks. That's the only reason which could possibly matter.

[Dat Guy]

15 hours ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

Use whatever tools makes your life easier. If anyone else says otherwise they're just salty 

I disagree. Adding multi-megabyte JavaScript files to websites makes "your life easier" as well, but you still shouldn't do that unless you have a very good reason to.

[straight_stewie]

2 hours ago, Dat Guy said:

I disagree. Adding multi-megabyte JavaScript files to websites makes "your life easier" as well, but you still shouldn't do that unless you have a very good reason to. 

Clearly we aren't talking about website design.

We are talking about using tools such as WPF and QT to create GUIs for desktop applications. I'm not sure about QT, but XAML/C# is nearly as fast as manipulating Windows in C++. You do loose some features (well, not really. P/Invoke is useful) that might be useful, but unless you're designing a game, do you really need blitting?

[Dat Guy]

Just now, straight_stewie said:

We are talking about using tools such as WPF and QT to create GUIs for desktop applications.

Which is the same thing, that's why I chose the example of JavaScript bloat. WPF and Qt add quite a lot of overhead, including their very own C++/C# dialect. You could ignore the security and performance implications. But you really should not.

[reniat]

4 hours ago, Dat Guy said:

Which is the same thing, that's why I chose the example of JavaScript bloat. WPF and Qt add quite a lot of overhead, including their very own C++/C# dialect. You could ignore the security and performance implications. But you really should not.

I'm curious, where do you draw the line with regards to performance for GUI framworks? If you wanted to make a win32 application, would you only work directly with GDI objects for everything?

[Dat Guy]

If you want to achieve the best performance and the lowest overhead: yes. But you'll find yourself writing your own API wrappers soon.

[reniat]

1 hour ago, Dat Guy said:

But you'll find yourself writing your own API wrappers soon.

Would you make a wrapper for every project, or would you abstract that wrapper into its own system so you can reuse it in other projects? Because if you do that, it just sounds like you wrote your own GUI framework lol. Which is fine, but then you are basically just weighing the engineering cost of writing in house vs using existing technologies.

[Dat Guy]

52 minutes ago, reniat said:

it just sounds like you wrote your own GUI framework lol

The resulting code is nothing else but a plain Windows API code, so there is not a single additional header file or even library needed.

[reniat]

19 hours ago, Dat Guy said:

The resulting code is nothing else but a plain Windows API code, so there is not a single additional header file or even library needed.

That still sounds like a lot of lower level GUI code, which is still an engineering cost to consider.

[Mira Yurizaki]

17 minutes ago, reniat said:

That still sounds like a lot of lower level GUI code, which is still an engineering cost to consider.

It also just smells like premature optimization if this is something someone wants to consider before they even have a working app.

[reniat]

3 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

It also just smells like premature optimization if this is something someone wants to consider before they even have a working app.

and premature optimization makes knuth mad!