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Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

blog.qt.io

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Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#141

Post by pjmlp »

ori_b wrote: post #79
eslaught wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can see where web assembly could take us, but I am confused about why people seem to want to go there.

Because Flash, Applets, .NET, Silverlight, ActiveX, NaCL,....

Difference being that WASM is kind of blessed format.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#142

Post by pjmlp »

oblio wrote: post #18
cmsj wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See also https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death... You jest, but this sort of thing probably is the death of almost all native software, sadly.

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…

Well it would be great if there weren't hundred of FOSS desktop variants....

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#143

Post by kuschku »

mwcampbell wrote: post #68

Unfortunately, this port seems to lack accessibility for blind people and others that require assistive technology. My conclusion is based on the demos linked elsewhere on this thread. [0] I have no idea how to make a conventional GUI toolkit accessible with ARIA, but I hope the Qt developers figure it out. Edit: Forgot to mention that I tested on Windows with a screen reader and Chrome. [0]: https://msorvig.github.i…

Accessibility like that likely won't be possible, as the only way to get accessibility in browsers is with the DOM, which is very limited in functionality.

If you wish to have accessible applications, you'll need to run the native applications instead.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#144

Post by kuschku »

pjmlp wrote: post #142
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…

Well it would be great if there weren't hundred of FOSS desktop variants....

There are only a handful you'd ever care about, and Qt apps work fine on all of them.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#145

Post by imtringued »

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.

You can just use nodejs to execute wasm code. Not sure about how to have a native GUI though.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#146

Post by giancarlostoro »

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…

> Qt experts will argue on all these points, "It's a library, it shouldn't do XYZ", but at the end of the day, Qt is a means to ship Desktop and Mobile Software, and by ignoring the entire Developer Experience from end-to-end, they miss the mark.

Also they already build tooling for Qt such as Qmake and Qt Creator, it seems to me their goals are clearly to make those goals attainable, it may not be as perfect as the alternatives but it does do a decent job at the very least, but I do agree, the licensing does keep me away from using Qt usually just because I never know where a pet project might end me up.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#147

Post by imtringued »

spearmunkie wrote: post #39
alde wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebAssembly is binary packed bytecode and generally takes much less space than UTF-8 JavaScript source files.

I don't see why we won't be able to reference common 3rd party libraries along with their version number and cache them across websites. Eventually a giant repo of common libraries will be built.

tree shaking optimizations will result in everyone having a different qt.wasm.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#148

Post by ake1 »

pjmlp wrote: post #133
pcwalton wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the only widely used license that i know of that would get violated by this kind of use (i think) is the AGPL.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#149

Post by littlestymaar »

yoz-y wrote: post #135
littlestymaar wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the native version already does that! What can electron do that the native version cannot ? The point of electron is that it let you write code once (in JavaScript or something that transpile to js, like TypeScript or Elm) and built multi-plateform software. But if you have a native software that can be built in wasm, it also can be built on Windows + Mac + Linux. Why using electron in that case?

Electron is great if you don't want to write native code (and deal with the debugging complexity of C or C++). If you already have a cross-plateform native app in written with Qt, why the hell would you want to put that in Electron?! And remind that if your C++ isn't cross-plateform already, you won't be able to build to wasm.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#150

Post by yoz-y »

littlestymaar wrote: post #149
yoz-y wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the native version already does that! What can electron do that the native version cannot ? The point of electron is that it let you write code once (in JavaScript or something that transpile to js, like TypeScript or Elm) and built multi-plateform software. But if you have a native software that can be built in wasm, it also can be built on Windows + Mac + Linux. Why using electron in that case? Electron is grea…

You are right, in this case it does not make sense since you can already distribute the Qt compiled version.
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