No Limits
Because we had the moc for signals and slots, we could add other useful things to it that could not be done with templates. Among these are scoped translations via a generated tr() function, and an advanced property system with introspection and extended runtime type information. The property system alone is a great advantage: a powerful and generic user interface design tool like Qt Designer would be a lot harder to write - if not impossible - without a powerful and introspective property system. But it does not end here. We also provide a dynamic qobject_cast<T>() mechanism that does not rely on the system's RTTI and thus does not share its limitations. We use it to safely query interfaces from dynamically loaded components. Another application domain are dynamic meta objects. We can e.g. take ActiveX components and at runtime create a meta object around it. Or we can export Qt components as ActiveX components by exporting its meta object. You cannot do either of these things with templates.
C++ with the moc essentially gives us the flexibility of Objective-C or of a Java Runtime Environment, while maintaining C++'s unique performance and scalability advantages. It is what makes Qt the flexible and comfortable tool we have today.
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