I have faith that the Qt project won't spend time shipping this if it doesn't offer advantages. Give them time, and a little benefit of the doubt based on a very long history of excellence.
I would argue that Qt's problem is:
* Licensing is expensive (look it up, you can't just use it for free for large-scale commercial projects, contrary to what many people believe)
* Getting started with Qt is painful and integrating it into an existing codebase even moreso - get ready to suffer with C++ linker nonsense
* You have to write in languages that are not particularly enjoyable to ship a production application (C++, JavaScript but without The Nice Parts of modern JS web dev)
* The "deploy" bit is completely left to the reader, Qt doesn't help you write apps and ship them end-to-end. Contrast this with Electron which has a pretty strong (albeit a bit mysterious) packaging and auto-update pipeline
Qt experts will argue on all these points, "It's a library, it shouldn't do XYZ", but at the end of the day, Qt is a means to ship Desktop and Mobile Software, and by ignoring the entire Developer Experience from end-to-end, they miss the mark.
* Getting started: I agree it is painful. There's a definite learning curve here. I believe it's worth it obviously, but that's obviously subjective.
* Language choices: There are binding for quite a few other languages. There's a lot of pyqt projects out there. But I disagree that C++ is painful - it really depends on who wrote it. Well written C++ is pleasant, poorly written C++ that abuses things is awful. The javascript portion does suck tho, you are right. It will improve, but it doesn't improve quickly.
* Deploy bit: you predicted my argument here. I favor the system package manager.
I find it quite acceptable.
- Willing to give your work for free the same way as taking Qt's work? No problem, LGPL has you covered.
- No issues with dynamic linking, still wanting to use the work of others for free? No problem, LGPL has you covered.
- What to sell it for lots of cash? Then give the Qt guys a piece of the cake back and be happy they still exist.
I wonder what are the nice parts of JS web dev, collecting new frameworks and build tools every week, or functions as packages?
In fact I am pretty opinionated that some of the new UI goodies are only exposed via QML, which wouldn't be a problem if people stopped writing logic there.
You can absolutely use it for free in any project, as long as you conform to LGPLv3.
Regarding JS: You're not supposed to write more than glue logic in JS - well, that's the practical experience. For some reason, the Qt company recommends more JS use than that.
Deployment is a little bit of a pain but they actually provide software to help - macdeployqt and windeployqt bundle everything up into a dmg or a zip.
You aren't forced to use QML. I kind of hate it and QtWidgets are much more mature - I just use those. Sure maybe they aren't being developed so much but they're still maintained. I don't think they'll go away for a long time.
Qt is great.
uh... yes you can. It's LGPL. Chromium and libchromiumcontent used in Electron are also under LGPL and this does not cause problems anywhere.
https://github.com/Timmmm/robocut/blob/master/CMakeLists.txt
Also they already build tooling for Qt such as Qmake and Qt Creator, it seems to me their goals are clearly to make those goals attainable, it may not be as perfect as the alternatives but it does do a decent job at the very least, but I do agree, the licensing does keep me away from using Qt usually just because I never know where a pet project might end me up.
I should look this up because Qt is something I've got my eyes on for small projects that could get big. On that note, are you able to define "large-scale" for me? Would a desktop app' interfacing with a remote API be "large-scale"?
> You have to write in languages that are not particularly enjoyable to ship a production application (C++, JavaScript but without The Nice Parts of modern JS web dev)
I'm looking at the Golang bindings for Qt (to implement my point above.) Have you considered it? Is Go something you'd consider?
Qt with Rust is progressing well.
Given that, why would you use this instead of just building a compiled package for a targeted platform?
Oh boy, sometimes you just walk away from a crash, but you're never the same.
It is great for intranet applications for large companies and other internal tools that are already in it, but otherwise it is a non starter.
Webassembly excels when it is minimized around core performance problems. Not when it is the whole app.
I feel ill just reading that sentence
Qt WebGL streaming (qplatform/qpa plugin):
The Qt binary runs on your PC as normal, but instead of opening an X11/Win32 window, opens a network port. You can open the URL in a browser to see the interface. Only one connection is allowed / only one user can interact with the app at a time.
Technology preview since 5.10, will be "TP2" status in 5.11. See http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/11/14/qt-webgl-cinematic-experie... and http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/07/07/qt-webgl-streaming-merged/
Qt for WebAssembly:
The entire QtWidgets / QML libraries are compiled to WASM and run clientside. There is no server-side component.
Will be released as a technology preview in the upcoming 5.11 release.
GTK 3 has something like that, too. Tried it once; super weird seeing Nautilus inside a browser. Cool, but weird.
Yeah. It's called Broadway. If someone wish to give a try, see https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk-broadway.html
But a webgl canvas id doable and I think what they are aiming for. Which would be great for QML.
Also it is very incomplete. For example there's no way to do custom widgets that draw text (e.g. a graph). There's no good text area widget (there is one but it is extremely limited - you couldn't use it for a log output for example).
Plain QtWidgets is way way better on every level except animation and styling. And maybe touch support.
But if I were making a mobile app I'd definitely use Flutter. Much nicer experience than QML.
And not like: JS is so shitty, better we make everything with it, even if there are better alternatives.
?
I can't imagine many people would like to download a 60GB AAA game or something like Photoshop to run it in the browser.
Not saying we're there yet, but it's not hard to see where WASM could take us.
There are plenty of downsides to having ubiquitous WASM-compiled cross-platform "browser-native" apps, and having basically everything forcefully turned into an experience akin to ChromeOS out of convenience for app developers, but that doesn't feel like one.
0 - http://vps2.etotheipiplusone.com:30176/redmine/projects/emsc...
It's impressive and exciting it can run a full app like KATE. It feels as if you're running a Linux VM inside the browser, but no!
Edit: Forgot to mention that I tested on Windows with a screen reader and Chrome.
If you wish to have accessible applications, you'll need to run the native applications instead.
But seriously, you say this like it's horrible, but a bytecode/VM that allows us to abstract over code that runs in a browser/code that runs a native app/code that runs in a device driver is really exciting. The fact that it allows infinite nesting is a inevitable mildly beneficial side effect to having interoperability.
The QTWebView is a separate plugin component with its own set of dependencies.
You wouldn't want to do that anyways, much more effecient to just communicate from Qt to Javascript webviews (but I'm sure you know that :))
Let's say 20% of that is images (it's actually less) ... it is not a problem to fit quite an extensive C++ program in that.
You jest, but this sort of thing probably is the death of almost all native software, sadly.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)#Applications_usi...
> To give an example, the app I’m working on (https://github.com/OSSIA/score) is roughly 300kloc of Qt / C++ code and compiled in WASM almost from the first try. I’m still having freezes in some places but overall it’s working great.
But then again, since 2017, anything that can happen will.
On the other hand, if you already do have a Qt application, then you can maybe get a webapp for almost free?
I've been asked by a customer to port my recent Qt app to iOS. Got the equipment, was about to get the development environment set up, got XCode installed....and now this.
This is pretty exciting if it all works as expected.
EDIT: aaaaaaand after trying some of the demos at https://github.com/msorvig/qt-webassembly-examples using a brand new iPad (iOS11/A10 Fusion core) using Safari, half the examples run out of memory, and the other half aren't touch enabled. Hmm.
EDIT2: Firefox iOS, same set of crashes.
