I'm very interested to hear your opinion on WxWidgets, as I have heard more desktop app devs endorse it over the years. What features makes QT win out over it?
Also, I know this might sound crazy, but what about (f/m)asm?
Not sure on Qt's features as I last used it in the KDE 3.5 days for basic basic apps, but I have used wxWidgets extensively. The Mac port has improved significantly recently, although there are still bugs.
It uses the native UI so fits in better with OSes, whereas Qt ones stand out to me (you can see the buttons aren't native). I did a lot of stuff that was "owner drawn" so reimplemented OnPaint to draw things myself for custom-look controls.
wxWidgets dropped its ODBC support a few years back so talking to databases likely needs another library. Also the ports/HTTP section of it isn't massively useful so I use libCurl instead.
Despite the bugs, it is quick to build and I found working with it enjoyable. Some controls (like the wxDataViewCtrl I think) were really slow so I wrote my own; the OpenGL wrapper works alright but I had to put some work into forcing it to resize; basically be prepared to put some work in - but it is rewarding. I like the layout mechanism - makes other systems like MFC look poor!
You can build wxWidgets and force it to use the STL for its container classes etc; Qt appears to implement everything again instead of just using the existing STL I think.
The developers are helpful and the forum is useful, at least for basic problems.
I enjoy(ed) using it anyway.
It was so long ago that I used WxWidgets I'm not sure my opinion has value any more. Certainly 10 years ago it suffered from poor documentation (like most open source projects) but the Python bindings were very nice. Also Qt has a nice interface builder (not as nice as Cocoa but very useful) WxWidgets didn't have one at the time.
I don't know what (f/m)asm is in this context, sorry.
wxWidgets wins because of native widgets, a handier license, and no moc etc requirements.
I think Qt wins in all other domains though. Documentation, extensiveness and quality of the non-GUI stuff, etc.
But not having native widgets kinda sucks. You can see that when you make that compromise, the question comes why not to use Electron (which is a competitor of those two in reality).
Also, I know this might sound crazy, but what about (f/m)asm?