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Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

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Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#161

Post by jcelerier »

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 expensive (look it up, you can't just use it for free for large-scale commercial projects, contrary to what many people believe)

uh... yes you can. It's LGPL. Chromium and libchromiumcontent used in Electron are also under LGPL and this does not cause problems anywhere.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#162

Post by weberc2 »

kuschku wrote: post #144
pjmlp wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But Qt itself is a dumpster fire. It just happens to be one of the least bad toolkits for Linux.

Disclaimer: My last job was Qt developer.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#163

Post by kuschku »

mwcampbell wrote: post #160
kuschku wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What if some application developers don't make a native version available? Accessibility should be the default on all platforms, not something that application developers have to go out of their way to support.

> Accessibility should be the default on all platforms, not something that application developers have to go out of their way to support.

Complain to the browser developers then, they’re the reason why this is so hard for Qt running on the web.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#164

Post by jcelerier »

vram22 wrote: post #156
IshKebab wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

>You can totally use it for free in large scale commercial projects. Just link with it dynamically. Can anyone explain why it is free to use if you link with dynamically, but not statically? (I've seen this point come up a few times in discussions about Qt here on HN.) I know what dynamic and static linking mean, but not clear about the connection to free vs. paid Qt use. Is it something obvious that I'm missing? Onl…

> Can anyone explain why it is free to use if you link with dynamically, but not statically? (I've seen this point come up a few times in discussions about Qt here on HN.)

long story short: it's actually false, you can entirely ship your app linked statically with Qt under LGPL and still comply with the license. However, you have to ship your .o files: basically, what the LGPL requires is for people getting your app to be able to relink your app with their custom version of the LGPL libs (so Qt).

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#165

Post by michaelmrose »

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…

The cross platform part is called source code. If all the chunks you use to build your app are cross platform packaging wont be horrible.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#166

Post by gmueckl »

candiodari wrote: post #158
gmueckl wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except this looks like it would be a big download, wouldn't it? And how would this UI interact with assistive applications like screen readers?

According to my chrome network tab cnn.com now comes to 1.7 megabyte. Without ad blocking, over double that. Let's say 20% of that is images (it's actually less) ... it is not a problem to fit quite an extensive C++ program in that.

Have you checked the sizes of the Qt libraries lately? QtCore or QtWidgets larger than 5MB each. Qt is simply an enormous amount of code. I currently can't get any of the wasm files for the demos to load to compare those, though.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#167

Post by michaelmrose »

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....

This seems to be a common complaint as if we were all standing on a life raft pushing it down with the collective weight of our respective keisters.

If only some people would stop contributing to creative work you don't see the value of and distributing it for free on the internet!

At present you have

Debian and a bazillion ubuntu derivatives using a debian package. ubuntu/debian are going to have different versions of some libraries but you can package deps with your app.

Arch and derivatives have a pkgbuild. This is quite simple if anyone cares about your app your arch users will probably upload one for you to the arch user repo.

Fedora and suse have rpms. These will be similar but not identical.

3 packages and you can cover most of your potential users.

In the future you reasonably may expect to be able to distribute a flatpak and be done with it.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#168

Post by k__ »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #75
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.

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

That's what I thought.

Web-apps are architected fundamentally different than classical software.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#169

Post by k__ »

joezydeco wrote: post #151
ahartmetz wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A few notes: 1) Qt Widgets development stopped with 5.0. I had bugs filed on the embedded Linux targets and was told "sorry, these will never be fixed". 2) #1 means that Qt wants you to use QML. I need to run a Javascript engine on my target? Note in the comments of that blog post that they hope to run on an A7 (or really fast M7)...someday. 2b) ...And if they do run on a lower end platform, you still need a POSIX O/…

Never understood the obsession some people have with Qt

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#170

Post by vram22 »

jcelerier wrote: post #164
vram22 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can totally use it for free in large scale commercial projects. Just link with it dynamically. Can anyone explain why it is free to use if you link with dynamically, but not statically? (I've seen this point come up a few times in discussions about Qt here on HN.) I know what dynamic and static linking mean, but not clear about the connection to free vs. paid Qt use. Is it something obvious that I'm missing? Onl…

> Can anyone explain why it is free to use if you link with dynamically, but not statically? (I've seen this point come up a few times in discussions about Qt here on HN.) long story short: it's actually false, you can entirely ship your app linked statically with Qt under LGPL and still comply with the license. However, you have to ship your .o files: basically, what the LGPL requires is for people getting your app…

Thanks for the reply.
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