C++ GUI Programming with Qt4: Introduction to C++ for Java and C# Programmers

• By Jasmin Blanchette and Mark Summerfield
• Nov 12, 2009
• Sample Chapter is provided courtesy of Prentice Hall

This chapter is from the book
C++ GUI Programming with Qt4, 2nd Edition

D. Introduction to C++ for Java and C# Programmers

• Getting Started with C++
• Main Language Differences
• The Standard C++ Library

This appendix assumes that you are familiar with object-oriented concepts such as inheritance and polymorphism and that you want to learn C++. To avoid making this book an unwieldy 1500 page doorstop by including a complete C++ primer, this appendix confines itself to essentials. It presents the basic knowledge and techniques necessary to understand the programs presented in the rest of the book, with enough information to start developing cross-platform C++ GUI applications using Qt.

At the time of this writing, C++ is the only realistic option for developing cross-platform, high-performance, object-oriented GUI applications. Its detractors usually point out that Java or C#, which dropped C compatibility, is nicer to use; in fact, Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of C++, noted in The Design and Evolution of C++ (Addison-Wesley, 1994) that "within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out".

Fortunately, when we program with Qt, we usually stick to a subset of C++ that is very close to the utopian language envisioned by Stroustrup, leaving us free to concentrate on the problem at hand. Furthermore, Qt extends C++ in several respects, through its innovative "signals and slots" mechanism, its Unicode support, and its foreach keyword.

In the first section of this appendix, we will see how to combine C++ source files to obtain an executable program. This will lead us to explore core C++ concepts such as compilation units, header files, object files, and libraries—and to get familiar with the C++ preprocessor, compiler, and linker.

Then we will turn to the most important language differences between C++, Java, and C#: how to define classes, how to use pointers and references, how to overload operators, how to use the preprocessor, and so on. Although the C++ syntax is superficially similar to that of Java and C#, the underlying concepts differ in subtle ways. At the same time, as an inspirational source for Java and C#, the C++ language has a lot in common with these two languages, including similar data types, the same arithmetic operators, and the same basic control flow statements.

The last section is devoted to the Standard C++ library, which provides ready-made functionality that can be used in any C++ program. The library is the result of more than thirty years of evolution, and as such it provides a wide range of approaches including procedural, object-oriented, and functional programming styles, and both macros and templates. Compared with the libraries provided with Java and C#, the Standard C++ library is quite narrow in scope; for example, it has no support for GUI programming, multithreading, databases, internationalization, networking, XML, or Unicode. To develop in these areas, C++ programmers are expected to use various (often platform-specific) third-party libraries.

This is where Qt saves the day. Qt began as a cross-platform GUI toolkit (a set of classes that makes it possible to write portable graphical user interface applications) but rapidly evolved into a full-blown application development framework that partly extends and partly replaces the Standard C++ library. Although this book uses Qt, it is useful to know what the Standard C++ library has to offer, since you may have to work with code that uses it.