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Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

blog.qt.io

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Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#41

Post by krapp »

bhouston wrote: post #37
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".

It reimplements the UI layer and event layer instead of using the existing css/ Dom layer right? And does that not prevent scraping, accessibility and deep linking as well as adds a lot of download time? It is great for intranet applications for large companies and other internal tools that are already in it, but otherwise it is a non starter. Webassembly excels when it is minimized around core performance problems.…

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 really know that yet. Everything around Webassembly is still at the preview/POC stage, Webassembly itself hasn't matured and we don't know what sort of tooling, caching or modular integration of code would be feasible within browsers to make downloading software more efficient than just downloading one giant WASM blob.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#42

Post by bhouston »

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.

The versioning will be very custom and generally they will not be shared across apps. Just like react.js isn't shared across apps.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#43

Post by bhouston »

krapp wrote: post #41
bhouston wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reimplements the UI layer and event layer instead of using the existing css/ Dom layer right? And does that not prevent scraping, accessibility and deep linking as well as adds a lot of download time? It is great for intranet applications for large companies and other internal tools that are already in it, but otherwise it is a non starter. Webassembly excels when it is minimized around core performance problems.…

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.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#44

Post by bhouston »

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…

They should port the rendering of the qt components to Dom/css with a web assembly backend. That would seem like a web app but allow for c++ code reuse.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#45

Post by [deleted] »

infinite8s wrote: post #32
gpm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we will run this all on nebulet, an OS being written for a pure web assembly user space [0]. But seriously, you say this like it's horrible, but a bytecode/VM that allows us to abstract over code that runs in a browser/code that runs a native app/code that runs in a device driver is really exciting. The fact that it allows infinite nesting is a inevitable mildly beneficial side effect to having interoperability.…

So basically Squeak, a 25 yr old technology that still runs bitexact across all it's virtual machines.

[deleted]

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#46

Post by Havelock »

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.

Agreed Qt is a great framework and I'm excited to see this development.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#47

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

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…

> 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.

GTK 3 has something like that, too. Tried it once; super weird seeing Nautilus inside a browser. Cool, but weird.

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#48

Post by bitL »

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.

Make Electron-like desktop apps but with Qt or within a browser with navigation/menu etc. bars? Running both over Internet and locally at native speed? Avoiding JavaScript for Web UI? I'd be happy to have that!

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#49

Post by [deleted] »

kllrnohj wrote: post #31
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.

Your JS source files typically don't have all the code necessary to re-implement 2D drawing, text handling, i18n code, etc... That's already been downloaded & provided in the form of the browser itself.

[deleted]

Re: Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

#50

Post by mozumder »

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.

Qt is great and probably the best cross-platform app-development environment.

Given that, why would you use this instead of just building a compiled package for a targeted platform?

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