Qt Group Buys IAR Systems Group

Post by ndiddy » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 5:39 PM UTC

Palomides wrote: post #7

vintagedave wrote: post #3

I'm familiar with the normal MSVC/Clang/GCC/EDG C++ compilers, but not IAR's. They seem to make C++ compilers for embedded systems. Does anyone know if these are their own, or based on something like Clang? Their supported standards list 'libc++' [1] which implies LLVM and potentially Clang. I could not find info online. "IAR Embedded Workbench C++ is dialectal and contains some features not part of standard C++." [2…

I'm not sure there's much overlap in use cases, considering the two very separate classes of 'embedded'; Qt is used on Linux capable devices and IAR is MCUs why would Qt want to customize a compiler when they still need to support llvm/gcc/msvc?

Post by bluGill » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 5:41 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #17

p0w3n3d wrote: post #6

I have a C++ seasoned colleague who says that It framework went behind the current C++ standard, however I remember Qt Framework much cleaner than C++ itself (by making a sort of a enhanced subset), and would prefer use it. What are your opinions?

Take this with a grain of salt because it's been about 10 years since I slung serious C++. Just my opinion of course, but if you go all-in with the Qt libraries, it's a lot better (and safer). Most people only think about Qt as a GUI framework, but it's much, much more than that. It's a very rich set of libraries that do way more than just UI. We actually used Qt for our server too! So I agree with you, Qt tends to b…

Post by ndiddy » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 6:12 PM UTC

rurban wrote: post #16

I once tried to get a IAR C++ embedded codebase to compile with g++ and it's stdlib on a very small chip. It eventually compiled but never worked. I'll have to rewrite it in C instead. There were many hacks, like filling the stack with sentinels to detect it at run-time. The linker script was horrible. Rewrote everything from scratch. The resulting code was many KB too large for the available space, it would have nee…

Post by delfinom » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 6:20 PM UTC

ndiddy wrote: post #25

rurban wrote: post #16

I once tried to get a IAR C++ embedded codebase to compile with g++ and it's stdlib on a very small chip. It eventually compiled but never worked. I'll have to rewrite it in C instead. There were many hacks, like filling the stack with sentinels to detect it at run-time. The linker script was horrible. Rewrote everything from scratch. The resulting code was many KB too large for the available space, it would have nee…

If IAR was able to make the existing C++ codebase fit in the chip's flash and GCC wasn't, that seems like a win for IAR. If you're selling products in volume, the cost of the IAR license is dwarfed by the amount of money you save by using a part with less flash.

Post by thegrim33 » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 7:20 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #23

freedomben wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take this with a grain of salt because it's been about 10 years since I slung serious C++. Just my opinion of course, but if you go all-in with the Qt libraries, it's a lot better (and safer). Most people only think about Qt as a GUI framework, but it's much, much more than that. It's a very rich set of libraries that do way more than just UI. We actually used Qt for our server too! So I agree with you, Qt tends to b…

Modern c++ does some things better than qt, others it is still worse. Just unique ptr is better than qt's parent-child object model (memory management only, parent child is useful for other things)