3 ms·

The article itself lists portability as their most important selling point.

• sho_hn 7y ago
  Yes, but - the point the blog makes is more subtle than that. If you read closely, you'll find two contrasting and complementary statements - "desktop is the root of our offering" and "we see our biggest growth in embedded". What's going on there is that for that lucrative OEM product market I mentioned, it's a very attractive quality of Qt that their developers can test builds (of what is technical not a desktop app as it doesn't aim to integrate with the host platform) on their desktop system instead of having to remote-deploy to the embedded device or spin up an emulator for every change (cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EswaK8hTonA&t=42s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EswaK8hTonA&t=42s). A lot of Qt's lesser competitors in the domain don't offer this to the same extent. The other reason is that the desktop is very important as a recruitment vector for the companies that end up picking Qt partly because of the quality of the developer talent available. Not every young developer has access to a car infotainment test rig, but they have access to a desktop system; Qt needs to be on the desktop to allow you to learn it with just a desktop system. Plus open source communities like KDE that make a lot of desktop and mobile software act as a breeding ground for talented devs. Portability is in many ways about Qt not narrowing into a specialist/niche product, many of which it outcompetes in domains where it's the best option. So it is critical, but it's critical to avoid that slippery slope that would eventually hurt the markets that keep it afloat, even if not all the platforms equally bring in the money all times. It's about generality as a feature for a healthy systems technology.