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Miqt: MIT-licensed Qt bindings for Go

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Re: Miqt: MIT-licensed Qt bindings for Go

#31

Post by zerr »

ForHackernews wrote: post #22
mappu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the competing library is "soon" to release a commercial license No, after many years this never became available, and the maintainer went missing, taking the copyright with them. If it was really possible to buy a commercial license it's possible I might not have bothered to make the binding. My hope is that by choosing the MIT license for my bindings, one commercial app in the world will choose to use Qt Widgets i…

Isn't Qt still proprietary or semi-proprietary?

No. Just Qt Company hides this as much as they can.

Re: Miqt: MIT-licensed Qt bindings for Go

#32

Post by dagw »

ikari_pl wrote: post #25
rob74 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm probably oversimplifying things, but for me "permissive license" (MIT, BSD) is equivalent to the term "open source", and "copyleft license" ((L)GPL) "free software". I know that the term "open source" also includes (L)GPL-licensed software, but the "free software" advocates resist being lumped together with software that they perceive to be less free, so they very much prefer "free software".

so less permissive = more free. gives me something to think about.

All freedom is relative to the perspective you judge it. "Free" in this case is measured from the perspective of the software (and more specifically the source code), not the developer. The basic philosophy is that the easier it is lock up the source code and its development behind closed proprietary walls, the less free it is.

From the FSF perspective, your freedom to make the source code less free stands in direct opposition to the freedom of the source code.

Re: Miqt: MIT-licensed Qt bindings for Go

#33

Post by mappu »

ForHackernews wrote: post #22
mappu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the competing library is "soon" to release a commercial license No, after many years this never became available, and the maintainer went missing, taking the copyright with them. If it was really possible to buy a commercial license it's possible I might not have bothered to make the binding. My hope is that by choosing the MIT license for my bindings, one commercial app in the world will choose to use Qt Widgets i…

Isn't Qt still proprietary or semi-proprietary?

Qt Widgets is GPL since Qt 2.2 in 2000, and LGPL since Qt 4.5 in 2009.

Re: Miqt: MIT-licensed Qt bindings for Go

#34

Post by mappu »

shagrath wrote: post #29
rob74 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, that's a part of Lazarus (the "pas" at the end is a giveaway). Actually I've had this idea for some time that integrating Go into Lazarus might be worthwhile - I was a Delphi developer before I "jumped ship" to web development, but I still like the effortless way of building GUI applications with a proper GUI design tool, and Go's speed of compilation and some syntax elements make it appealing for Pascal develope…

You might like this : https://github.com/ying32/govcl

I spent some time using the GoVCL bindings of Lazarus LCL, and made some small app with it: https://code.ivysaur.me/yvbolt

It does work, but I had hoped for more, it is simply too far behind in many ways and is stuck on GTK2 (so no high DPI support). The LCL itself does support GTK3 and Qt5 (and nothing newer), but recompiling GoVCL to use them broke quite badly.

Re: Miqt: MIT-licensed Qt bindings for Go

#35

Post by rubymamis »

mappu wrote: post #8
bmitc wrote: post #4

Does this support Qt Quick and QML?

No(t yet), i've focused on the traditional desktop Widgets toolkit. There are other existing QML/Go bindings you might be interested in. Qt Widgets has a lot of benefits over QML. It is native compiled code whereas QML is interpreted; the native compiler (qmlsc) is proprietary and only available for commercial licensees. If you are happy with a large runtime for an interpreted UI then I'd suggest looking at web techn…

First of all, I wrote a block editor in QML[1] (the model in C++) that far outperform QTextEdit (part of Qt Widgets) at loading, scrolling and word-wrap resizing of very large documents (think, War and Peace) *with* the additional cost of being a block editor that can include a Kanban board, images, etc. So saying QML isn't performant is incorrect.

Secondly, my knowledge about the internal build tools such as qmltc, qmlcachegen, and qmlsc is quite limited, but isn't qmlcachegen also compiles QML documents[2]? And don't forget that the built-in Qt Quick components are either compiled to C++ or written natively in C++.

[1] https://get-notes.com/

[2] https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtqml-qtquick-compiler-tech.html#summ...

Re: Miqt: MIT-licensed Qt bindings for Go

#36

Post by mappu »

rob74 wrote: post #17
mappu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of kitech's work was in making the large C ABI wrapper. There's another C ABI wrapper already in Debian (libqt5pas) that might be possible to use directly.

Ah, that's a part of Lazarus (the "pas" at the end is a giveaway). Actually I've had this idea for some time that integrating Go into Lazarus might be worthwhile - I was a Delphi developer before I "jumped ship" to web development, but I still like the effortless way of building GUI applications with a proper GUI design tool, and Go's speed of compilation and some syntax elements make it appealing for Pascal develope…

> I still like the effortless way of building GUI applications with a proper GUI design tool

I really like this too. Qt Widgets offers this too, with the Qt Designer app. It's really easy to use, just like Delphi, Winforms or old VB6.

The Qt Creator IDE has integrated designer and also LSP support for Go, an integration could be really interesting for rapid development.

Re: Miqt: MIT-licensed Qt bindings for Go

#37

Post by nikanj »

ForHackernews wrote: post #22
mappu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the competing library is "soon" to release a commercial license No, after many years this never became available, and the maintainer went missing, taking the copyright with them. If it was really possible to buy a commercial license it's possible I might not have bothered to make the binding. My hope is that by choosing the MIT license for my bindings, one commercial app in the world will choose to use Qt Widgets i…

Isn't Qt still proprietary or semi-proprietary?

Most of Qt remains available under LGPL, but the Qt company does their best to dissuade you from using it without a commercial license.

They have succeeded in convincing me, for example. I don't want to build anything on a platform where the vendor is trying to drive me away

Re: Miqt: MIT-licensed Qt bindings for Go

#38

Post by prmoustache »

zerr wrote: post #31
ForHackernews wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Qt still proprietary or semi-proprietary?

No. Just Qt Company hides this as much as they can.

It is only proprietary if you are building proprietary code AND statically link to it but open source/free (LGPL) if you are building software with a compatible license or are linking dynamically. I think it is fair.

Re: Miqt: MIT-licensed Qt bindings for Go

#39

Post by mappu »

sime2009 wrote: post #24

Is it possible to extend/subclass an existing QWidget and customise it?

For e.g. PaintEvent() from pure Go code? Not yet, but I have some idea on how to make it possible.

Until then, a nice feature of CGO is you can write one custom Qt subclass in a .cpp file in the same folder as your .go files. Your C++ will be compiled with `go build`, and you can use your custom class directly from Go/MIQT. So even if some advanced Qt feature is not in the binding, anything is still possible at least. I'll make an example about this.

Re: Miqt: MIT-licensed Qt bindings for Go

#40

Post by mappu »

rubymamis wrote: post #35
mappu wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No(t yet), i've focused on the traditional desktop Widgets toolkit. There are other existing QML/Go bindings you might be interested in. Qt Widgets has a lot of benefits over QML. It is native compiled code whereas QML is interpreted; the native compiler (qmlsc) is proprietary and only available for commercial licensees. If you are happy with a large runtime for an interpreted UI then I'd suggest looking at web techn…

First of all, I wrote a block editor in QML[1] (the model in C++) that far outperform QTextEdit (part of Qt Widgets) at loading, scrolling and word-wrap resizing of very large documents (think, War and Peace) *with* the additional cost of being a block editor that can include a Kanban board, images, etc. So saying QML isn't performant is incorrect. Secondly, my knowledge about the internal build tools such as qmltc,…

Your app looks really nice, I like the smooth animations in the web demo. A benefit of QML is that more of the rendering is done on the GPU, so the performance may differ depending on hardware.

qmlcachegen produces only bytecode, not compiled code.

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