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Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

blog.qt.io

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Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#101

Post by flukus »

mehrdadn wrote: post #89
xpaulbettsx wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I buy that, are you saying that the only reason that Qt hasn't completely taken over writing native software on (even desktop! not to mention mobile where Qt also works), is a marketing problem? 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 pai…

My main problem with Qt is just that it doesn't feel native, it's as simple as that. This trumps all other problems like the fact that it's a bazillion exabytes and painful to set up etc.

It certainly feels more native than web/electron, swing, XUL, GTK and just about every other cross platform technology. It's about as good as you'll get without a native client for each platform, which will always be the best option.

The only other options is the hybrid approach which uses native widgets like wxWidgets, but this means you're limited by the lowest common denominator.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#103

Post by colordrops »

ori_b wrote: post #78
alde wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is misdirected criticism. WebAssembly runs at almost native speeds on a single very lightweight "VM".

I think this is perfectly relevant criticism. Browsers are a huge amount of overhead to add to a cross platform toolkit, for virtually no benefit. Distributing full fledged programs like this via browsers is simply going to be a shit user experience, on top of the already terrible user experience that browsers give.

> virtually no benefit.

> Distributing full fledged programs like this via browsers is simply going to be a shit user experience

These statements are simply FUD. Single click "installation" with no dependency management to virtually every platform out there at near-native speed is a huge benefit. And browsers are already capable of installing desktop menu entries and icons, and running frameless in a way that looks no different from any other native application.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#104

Post by nurettin »

mehrdadn wrote: post #89
xpaulbettsx wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I buy that, are you saying that the only reason that Qt hasn't completely taken over writing native software on (even desktop! not to mention mobile where Qt also works), is a marketing problem? 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 pai…

My main problem with Qt is just that it doesn't feel native, it's as simple as that. This trumps all other problems like the fact that it's a bazillion exabytes and painful to set up etc.

Delphi is almost as "native" as they get on windows and you still need to do a lot of extra work just to draw a checkbox on a grid.

Use of native controls and their benefits is greatly exaggerated and it all comes down to some murky-feely subjective opinion.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#105

Post by ihalip »

eslaught wrote: post #36
k__ wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the impression WASM was about writing parts of web apps in it, so they get more performance. I can't imagine many people would like to download a 60GB AAA game or something like Photoshop to run it in the browser.

Actually, if I could have Photoshop run in a browser, with its full feature set, and running at >90% of full native speed, that would be pretty awesome. And I'd even be willing to wait for the multi-GB download as long as it only happened once (with small deltas thereafter). Not saying we're there yet, but it's not hard to see where WASM could take us.

It would be awesome indeed, but the disk cache can't grow indefinitely. I can't imagine anyone looking at their browser's 20GB disk cache and say it's ok.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#107

Post by slavik81 »

fsloth wrote: post #100
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qt devs need to eat too and they don't have a bunch of sugar daddies like Linus.

QT is a developed by a corporation. I would presume most QT core devs are employees of that organization.

That's more or less the story these days. Thiago Macieira (the maintainer for Qt Core) keeps stats on contributors.

https://www.macieira.org/blog/qt-stats/

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#108

Post by kllrnohj »

eslaught wrote: post #36
k__ wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the impression WASM was about writing parts of web apps in it, so they get more performance. I can't imagine many people would like to download a 60GB AAA game or something like Photoshop to run it in the browser.

Actually, if I could have Photoshop run in a browser, with its full feature set, and running at >90% of full native speed, that would be pretty awesome. And I'd even be willing to wait for the multi-GB download as long as it only happened once (with small deltas thereafter). Not saying we're there yet, but it's not hard to see where WASM could take us.

> Actually, if I could have Photoshop run in a browser, with its full feature set, and running at >90% of full native speed, that would be pretty awesome.

You won't get in the same universe as that until the web grows real threading support. Not this no-shared-data, ultra expensive, ultra heavy webworker nonsense.

Given SharedArrayBuffer seems to be un-shippable now due to Spectre, the planned future of WASM's threading seems uncertain. And without that WASM seems rather pointless to be honest. You just can't compete with native at anything compute when you can't use 80%+ of the CPU.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#109

Post by pjmlp »

xpaulbettsx wrote: post #52
freedomben wrote: post #38

Really surprised and saddened by the negative comments here. Qt is an amazing framework that has been around for nearly 30 years. Developing with it is a great experience, probably the most enjoyable coding I've done. 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'm not sure I buy that, are you saying that the only reason that Qt hasn't completely taken over writing native software on (even desktop! not to mention mobile where Qt also works), is a marketing problem? 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 pai…

Licensing is quite cheap compared to other commercial products in the same league.

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.

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