[martin_ky]

> With Qt you get a lot of conveniences and built-in magic, but I'd say at that point it's not really regular C++.

This is a common misconception of beginner Qt users or people who just looked at Qt superficially and decided not to use it, because it's not "regular C++".

You use Qt with 100% pure C++. Qt itself is written in 100% pure C++. The part that confuses people is the metaobject compiler (or MOC). This is a simple code generator tool that provides additional features like runtime type information and reflection. It does not modify your source code, only generates some additiona, 100% legal C++. Granted, this requires an extra build step before invoking the C++ compiler. But Qt's build system handles this automatically, and it's not really difficult to integrate into any other build system.

Starting with Qt 5, you don't even need to invoke the MOC compiler, because in many cases, the features provided with generated code were replaced by new C++11 functionality.

If/when C++ gets proper metaclasses and programmable compile-time code generation, there will be no more need for MOC, because all of its functions can then run in a single compilation step.

There's a great blog post debunking the myths about the QT metaobject compiler - https://woboq.com/blog/moc-myths.html