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Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

blog.qt.io

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Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#111

Post by pjmlp »

shawn wrote: post #92
freedomben wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Licensing: IANA lawyer, but my understanding is that the LGPL doesn't force you to release the entire source, unless you are shipping a single static binary or a custom version of Qt. If you dynamically link, you are good to go. * 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 f…

FWIW gamedevs have a natural aversion to anything with the term "GPL" in it. http://codesuppository.blogspot.com/2009/01/ Not saying it makes sense, just that groupthink is strong.

Games devs have aversion to the FOSS culture.

It doesn't play ball with IP business and NDA rules that are common place in the industry.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#112

Post by pjmlp »

Buttons840 wrote: post #83
ahartmetz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The licensing bit is really trivial to summarize: It's LGPLv3. Formerly v2, so now it can't be used for free in some applications where it formerly could. 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.

> You can absolutely use it for free in any project, as long as you conform to LGPLv3. So you're saying there are projects where I cannot use Qt? The fact is, there exists projects that do not have the option of using Qt without paying for expensive licensing. Such projects should at least consider using Electron which might have significant non-technical advantages for them. It is cool that what many consider to be…

Yeah, right.

"I don't want to pay for software, so here take a bloated browser as fake native app".

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#113

Post by pjmlp »

movedx wrote: post #90
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.

Even so, that's EXPENSIVE! It rules out a startup I'd say.

No, it is actually quite cheap.

Usually software licenses for commercial development tools have a few more zeros, or not even that, forcing one to schedule a meeting with their sales people.

Before the FOSS movement, startups somehow managed to pay for their software.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#114

Post by pjmlp »

pcwalton wrote: post #85
ori_b wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are a whole lot of native apps I just won't use because I don't want to go through the hassle of installing software. The macOS App Store is bad; Windows installers are worse. Entering a URL is a lot less friction. I don't think the user experience of Web apps has to be worse than native, but even if we grant that it's worse, I'll take it over the pain of installing apps. And, based on the experiences of numero…

Those SaaS are more than happy to have a Web wall to their products.

No more piracy, users only get access to the UI part.

They care use whatever they want from open source, without giving anything back and the world will only find out about license misuse if they employees speak out.

Best of all, they own their user's data, making it even harder to move away from them, than it ever was with Office formats.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#115

Post by Xuper »

k__ wrote: post #27
giancarlostoro wrote: post #16

Say what you will, we need these kind of projects in order to push forward WebAssembly (and eventually JavaScript may not be the only dominant language for front-end web development). I'm curious how much of the canvas they're taking advantage of if any of it. It's quite exciting. I might wind up porting one of my existing Qt applications just to try this out and see what that would be like.

Wasn't it more like: most people know JS so everything (server, mobile/desktpp apps, etc) was made with it. And not like: JS is so shitty, better we make everything with it, even if there are better alternatives. ?

It was the latter I am afraid. Then the general hype started and now we have insanity like Electron etc. Don't worry web assembly is here to help JS, not to replace it ;-).

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#117

Post by baq »

bhouston wrote: post #43
krapp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existing CSS/DOM layer is for rendering documents. It can be used to emulate a native GUI, just like languages can "compile" to javascript, and everyone can pretend it's really bytecode. But that doesn't mean this is a good idea, or that an actual bytecode for the web is just reinventing the wheel. >Webassembly excels when it is minimized around core performance problems. Not when it is the whole app. We don't re…

I think that is a fantasy of qt and c++ developers unfortunately. There will be very few use cases for qt in a browser loaded from the web. Optimized computation kernels yes. Full qt guis I do not see it happening. Qt should create an html/Dom/css front end that binds to the webassembly backend. Would be more efficient and web friendly.

There's a whole class of developers who won't touch js and html with a ten foot pole. Suddenly they can deploy software to the browser. What's not to like?

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#118

Post by grondilu »

Looking at software that uses Qt[1], I'd say I'll be impressed once they have compiled one of them, say for instance Stellarium, to Wasm. It'd be great to see how a full software, not just a toy demo, behaves in webassembly.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)#Applications_usi...

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#119

Post by cm2187 »

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.

I don’t know if it’s a good thing that every website must look like a bootstrap website and every iOS app must have the same Color and menus, etc.

The only issue I have with non homogeneous UI is that it is often an opportunity for not so gifted developers to become creative in term of basic UX and we often end up with no obvious way to go back, non discoverable features and other UX fails.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#120

Post by IshKebab »

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…

You can totally use it for free in large scale commercial projects. Just link with it dynamically.

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.

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