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It's good to see language compatibility mentioned, and I hope they follow through with it. There were really fantastic Common Lisp bindings for Qt4, but they r

It's good to see language compatibility mentioned, and I hope they follow through with it. There were really fantastic Common Lisp bindings for Qt4, but they relied on a tool called "Smoke", which stopped working with Qt5. My understanding is Smoke was used to create the early Python binding, but a different mechanism was used for the Python bindings in Qt5. For some reason the new technique wasn't as easy to use from other languages, so a lot of alternative language bindings stagnated on Qt4. I don't know if it's improved lately, but between using C++, the non-standard moc pre-processor, qmake, and little support from Qt itself, it's really hard to generate bindings for Qt now.

sime2009 7y ago
Here's a quick history lesson. Long ago Smoke was created by one guy, Richard Dale, to do bindings for Ruby (QtRuby). Smoke was generic enough to be used for other languages like Lisp and also the .Net CLI. Language bindings other than Python didn't really catch on and the community needed to make it all viable and self sustaining didn't emerge. It was mostly one person's passion project and they didn't get any real help. So it died. PyQt (Python) came from a small one man company in the UK called Riverbank Computing. It is mature and has been around for a long time. It used a custom tool called SIP for the bindings. Last time I checked it was still around. In the Qt Nokia era, a team was assembled by Qt to create official Python bindings to compete with PyQt. IIRC they used Swig to do it. Then they lost funding for a few years before being revived in some form at which point they were busy moving to their own home grown binding generator.
- cmaureir 7y ago
  And that binding generator is called Shiboken, which was motivated by boost::python and the same idea behind the binding generator written for Java in the old days (from QtJambi). At the moment Shiboken is more general, and mature and can be used even for C++ projects (which are not related to Qt). https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_for_Python/Shiboken https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_for_Python/Shiboken

sime2009 7y ago

Here's a quick history lesson. Long ago Smoke was created by one guy, Richard Dale, to do bindings for Ruby (QtRuby). Smoke was generic enough to be used for other languages like Lisp and also the .Net CLI. Language bindings other than Python didn't really catch on and the community needed to make it all viable and self sustaining didn't emerge. It was mostly one person's passion project and they didn't get any real help. So it died. PyQt (Python) came from a small one man company in the UK called Riverbank Computing. It is mature and has been around for a long time. It used a custom tool called SIP for the bindings. Last time I checked it was still around. In the Qt Nokia era, a team was assembled by Qt to create official Python bindings to compete with PyQt. IIRC they used Swig to do it. Then they lost funding for a few years before being revived in some form at which point they were busy moving to their own home grown binding generator.

cmaureir 7y ago
And that binding generator is called Shiboken, which was motivated by boost::python and the same idea behind the binding generator written for Java in the old days (from QtJambi). At the moment Shiboken is more general, and mature and can be used even for C++ projects (which are not related to Qt). https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_for_Python/Shiboken https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_for_Python/Shiboken