Qt evolved over time and at the time of writing this book, its version is 5.14. Its first public prerelease version was announced in 1995. More than two decades have passed and now Qt has a lot of powerful features that are used in almost all platforms, including mobile systems such as Android and iOS. With few exceptions, we can confidently write fully-featured GUI applications in C++ and Qt for all platforms. This is a big game-changer because companies hire smaller teams that specialize in one technology rather than having several teams for each specific platform.
If you are new to Qt, it is strongly recommended that you get familiar with it as much as you can (go to the end of this chapter for book references). Besides the regular components that GUI frameworks provide, Qt also introduces several concepts that are new or neatly implemented in the framework....