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Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

blog.qt.io

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Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#131

Post by littlestymaar »

krapp wrote: post #80
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.

Webassembly isn't designed or intended to run exclusively in the browser, though. A lot of people seem to assume that native webassembly apps would be packaged with Electron but I think that when the language matures a bit, it should be possible to get thinner native VMs without the unnecessary bulk of a browser.

Why would you package it in Electron? AFAIK, webassembly is mainly intended to be run on the web, in the browser. The main goal being you don't need to install anything.

Building a native app to wasm to package it into Electron sounds really weird to me. OK there's a security benefit thanks to sandboxing, but using Electron as a sandbox is really a strange idea.

And when it comes to portability, if you build you native app to webassembly, it can run anywhere. But if you add Electron to the mix, you need to build a different version for each platform, which destroy the portability benefit. If your app can be built on wasm, it can probably be compiled for different platform already. Adding Electron to the mix doesn't change any of that.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#133

Post by pjmlp »

pcwalton wrote: post #130
pjmlp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Violating OSS licenses is far more common with e.g. desktop Windows software than with Web-based SaaS.

Well I cannot see what they run on their servers, so it is anyone's guess.

At least with native code I can check what is on my hard disk.

And given my experience, it is hardly the case any company outside the big SV ones or whose main business is unrelated to software, that actually bothers to contribute anything back.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#135

Post by yoz-y »

littlestymaar wrote: post #131
krapp wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Webassembly isn't designed or intended to run exclusively in the browser, though. A lot of people seem to assume that native webassembly apps would be packaged with Electron but I think that when the language matures a bit, it should be possible to get thinner native VMs without the unnecessary bulk of a browser.

Why would you package it in Electron? AFAIK, webassembly is mainly intended to be run on the web, in the browser. The main goal being you don't need to install anything. Building a native app to wasm to package it into Electron sounds really weird to me. OK there's a security benefit thanks to sandboxing, but using Electron as a sandbox is really a strange idea. And when it comes to portability, if you build you nati…

Browsers still can not access the filesystem correctly, can't communicate with most of the devices you could plug into your computer, can't reasonably use keyboard shortcuts and so on.

Electron can.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#137

Post by yoz-y »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #122
Xuper wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;-).

I wouldn't be surprised to see WebAssembly only applications once WebAssembly matures and can "stand on it's own free" honestly. JavaScript for sure will hold dominance for many, many years however.

WebAssembly can not manipulate the DOM though no? Web applications got popular also because creating UIs with HTML and CSS is easy.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#138

Post by ahartmetz »

joezydeco wrote: post #91
CyberDildonics wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello world in Qt is 25MB as a demonstration of 'lightweight' Qt.

Nobody optimizes and recompiles the libraries anymore to configure out the unnecessary parts. The mechanisms are still there but the practice died when Qt stopped focusing on embedded targets.

Qt does focus very much on embedded targets:

http://blog.qt.io/blog/2016/08/18/introducing-the-qt-lite-pr...

Embedded is the biggest market for Qt right now.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#139

Post by ghettoimp »

drb91 wrote: post #30
oblio wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some things we mourn. Nobody mourns cross platform distribution of native apps. Anyone who does hasn’t had to manage the insanity of installer apps and of papering over a million different OS versions and app versions. It’s 2018 and we still don’t have a common, wide spread, OSS framework for self-updating native apps that runs on all the major desktop operating systems. And let’s not even go into app store…

The best native apps aren't cross platform. The worst native apps often are (at least from a mac perspective). We are simply moving to the lowest common denominator for all platforms, to the profit of business and the loss of the end-user. We can now develop software that is equally shitty for everyone much cheaper than we could before. Is that the end of the world? No, of course not. But we aren't building better to…

I don't disagree that the best native apps are amazing. But it seems so wrong to regard a desire to build cross-platform software as some kind of scheme by developers against their users. In so many cases, being able to use a program/service on many platforms is a huge part of what makes it valuable to the end-user. You can get your gmail from your computer, or your phone, or from a web cafe, and have it all work the same. You can share google docs with anyone and know they'll be able to access them. You can decide you're fed up with windows/macos/android/ios and you want to switch to something else, and most of your software will still be there waiting for you on the other side...

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#140

Post by IshKebab »

rms25 wrote: post #87
mappu wrote: post #35

Note that Qt has two separate technology previews for porting Qt apps to run in the web browser: 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, wi…

Having used QML in the past, its made the most sense to me out of all the UI/Animation setups I have ever used. This sounds amazing

I've used it a fair bit and it gets very messy very quickly. It pretty much encourages spaghetti code.

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.

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