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We Ported a Qt App from C++ to Python (2018) (ics.com)
36 points by ingve on June 22, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments


Worth mentioning that the vfx/animation industry is using PyQt and PySide for quite some time now [1].

Major third-party applications and libraries like Autodesk Maya, Pixar's Usd etc. make use of it.

My point being, it is not brand new technology just because it is now maintained by the Qt company. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if this industry is part of the reason why it gained official support.

The use in VFX also spawned a shim library called Qt.py that abstracts PySide, Pyside2, PyQt4 and PyQt5 away [2] - with certain limitations. Highly recommended in the transition phase from Qt4 to Qt5, or when you can't control the underlying Qt-Python library.

[1] http://vfxplatform.com/

[2] https://github.com/mottosso/Qt.py


I first used PySide for a QT application some years ago, and distinctly remember how nonexistent the documentation was. That said, C++ documentation was easy to be found, so I just used that. Nearly every function is mapped just the same WRT names and arguments.


I also ported a C++/QT app to a Python/Pyside2 app. Main reasons were that the original app was badly written and the team knew Python better than C++. This was quite straightforward, only difficulty was in trying to mix QThreads and Python Threads (basically: don't).


The last time I tried (a year ago) to do Qt with Python I was seriously annoyed about the poor interactive graphing support, has that improved? Maybe there's just a really good library I haven't found?


Have you tried pyqtgraph? That's IMO the best interactive graphing library for python and qt


The best I've found is still matplotlib embedded into a PyQt widget. It works, but the interactive graphing takes quite a bit of work for anything beyond pan/zoom.


Now can you do an evaluation of writing the same Qt App in Go and C#, languages I'm more familiar with, but don't have great cross-platform UI stories?




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