How Vochlea created Dubler's lightning-fast and beautiful-looking QML desktop user interface
To build Dubler, the smart people at Vochlea cherry-picked from different development frameworks. Juce, for instance, is the de-facto framework for low-latency, high-speed audio processing. A full-stack framework in its own right, it can also produce user interfaces in C++ and OpenGL.
One of Vochlea's challenges was that Dubler had so much going on under the hood, but they still needed to create a user interface that
- is fast enough to display audio processing in real-time
- represents all the features of a complex backend in a user-friendly manner
- wouldn't take months to design, develop, and iterate in C++
- looks snazzy
The reason Vochlea chose Qt for Dubler's UI was QML. QML is a declarative development language that retains a high performance and compiles quickly. This way, they could create a complex UI almost 15 times faster than the alternative: "If I were to create a complex UI in C++ and OpenGL it would take me a week, I can produce the same thing in a few hours without much or any performance loss," says Vochlea's CTO Daven Sanassy about QML.
Vochlea also took advantage of the enhanced cross-platform capabilities in Qt 6, which allowed them to write their UI in QML, but compile it on macOS running on Metal, or on Windows running on Direct3D.
Qt's signals and slots architecture and property system simplified interfacing between C++ and QML by allowing their C++ developer to connect the backend data to the UI very quickly.
Other helpful aspects of Qt 6, like the quality of Qt's profiler, documentation, and ecosystem sped things along even further.
