I am learning C++ again with a decade of PHP and web backend work in my hands. I am not “returning to my roots”. I did not have these roots. I am a web engineer walking into a language that assumes you meant the memory.
This series is not a curriculum, and I am not going to announce expertise at the end of chapter four. The point is to write while it is still strange.
Why bother
Most of my professional life is request/response: a process wakes up, does work, goes away. Even queues are still “do this later in a similar process”. Desktop software, compilers, and long-lived UI processes are a different contract. I want to understand that contract from the inside, not from a tweet about how real programmers use pointers.
Qt showed up because I actually want to build something that is not a browser talking to Laravel. That is the honest reason. Curiosity is the other one.
What this series is not
- A claim that I am a systems programmer
- A ranking of PHP versus C++
- A promise that I will finish a famous GUI toolkit book
It is a notebook. Wrong turns stay in.
Where to start
If you also arrived from PHP: PHP recycles the process. C++ does not, then what Qt actually is. If you want the installer scars, they live in the Problem Log.