Design/Architecture/Concept differences with Qt ?

[linrongbin16]

Hi,

ratatui is a TUI framework for terminal, while Qt is a GUI framework for desktop.

I hope you could share some thoughts about the QtWidget class architecture & design? Especially about:

1. Object ownership & parent-child tree structure, a parent widget can have children widgets:
   • Parent owns children ownership, once parent been destroyed, children will be destroyed.
   • Children will always display on top of the parent, and only display inside parent (in geometric shape).
2. Event system, user keyboard/mouse event will be handled by callback functions:
   • Parent will first try to calculate whether an event happens inside a child, and dispatch the event to that child if the event happens inside it.
   • Or the parent will handle the event by itself, if there's no child to process the event.
   • Each widget can bind callback functions to process the event.
3. Signals & Slots, allow any widgets to easily communicate with each other, which is much more flexible than the event system.

When I'm studying ratatui framework, I found the widget in ratatui is more like a view, which is more focused on rendering, there seems no event handlers or other data communications.

I understand there's big difference between ratatui & Qt, basically they're completely different things:

• ratatui (TUI) renders with characters on terminal, Qt (GUI) renders directly with OS drawing API.
• ratatui is written with rust, Qt is written with C++.
• Qt provides much more other systems than ratatui, such as QML, Qt Quick, Qt Test, etc, even support plugins.
• And a lot more.

But when looking at the widget concept, I found there're many concepts share some commonalities. So I still want to discuss it.

[joshka]

1. N/A as Ratatui doesn't track relationships between widgets at all (your app / widgets can choose to do this however). https://ratatui.rs/concepts/rendering/
2. N/A as Ratatui doesn't handle events at all - this is the app's responsibility to interact with the backend (crossterm, termion, termwiz)
3. N/A same

Ratatui mainly handles the move characters to the screen part of an app. The other bits are (currently at least) the app's responsibility.

[linrongbin16]

thanks for reply