Qt, a whole new programming language?

[youngroger]

Lately I've been making some simple C++ batch programs, but I'm intending to use Qt to start off with GUI progrmaming. First thing I did was buying some reading material, and after I opened those books I questioned myself the following: Are these QThreads, QSqlDatabase, QFileInfo, etcetera, necessary to use or can I just use the C++ implementation itself? Can I just use the MySQL C++ connector, or do I have to use the Qt-way of accessing databases?

I just want to use Qt for creating widgets, is this possible aswell?

[N3Roaster]

It certainly is possible to go around Qt in this way and only use it for widgets. The real question here is why you want to. To take your database example, you can use MySQL without going through anything in QtSql, but then if you want to later adapt your code to another database such as SQLite or PostgreSQL you'll have more work ahead of you. Even if you never do that, if you want to use any of the Qt widget classes that are designed to work with QtSql you'll be stuck writing your own implementations instead of being able to use what's already there. With your other examples you're more likely to accidentally tie yourself to a single operating system than if you just used the classes Qt provides and again you'll probably have to re-implement a good chunk of what Qt already provides once you're doing anything non-trivial. If you're going to deny yourself these abstractions it becomes questionable why you'd want to use Qt at all.