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How often and to what extent did you build using Qt? Your arguments against using Qt don't align with its actual capabilities. Qt has an extensive API so perhap
by Nicksil 5y ago
How often and to what extent did you build using Qt? Your arguments against using Qt don't align with its actual capabilities. Qt has an extensive API so perhaps you weren't aware Qt possesses such capabilities which would be understandable if your exposure to Qt was transient.
>If your Qt app has single C++ line of code cross platform builds become much harder.
As I mentioned, Qt has an extensive cross-platform API; indeed that API is Qt's value prop. If you've the need to write arch/platform-specific UI code, then it's very likely you'll find the solution to that problem somewhere within Qt's docs. If not, then you cannot expect to be able to write such code using Electron/JavaScript.
>Also regardless you still have to solve packaging and updates for Windows, macOS and Linux.
What's to solve? Qt has had these capabilities. If you describe a specific issue, you may have an argument, otherwise this statement makes no claim.
>Also it's much harder to do QA and it's take much more effort to maintain cross platform Qt app in general.
How so? This is such a broad and unspecific claim to the extent it isn't possible to form a counter argument. State specifically the issues making it much harder to complete these tasks using Qt.
>For Electron apps it's all much easier because all native code is heavily tested by other commercial software
Qt's testing suite is extensive. Qt is and has been deployed and "heavily tested" around the world for years. Qt is also deployed as an embedded technology.
>PS: I shipped C++ apps built using Qt and cross-platform part is huge time sink.
I'm not sure you spent much time doing this because Qt makes shipping cross-platform software so simple it sometimes feels like I'm cheating (there are exceptions when dealing with very specific platform/arch-specific items as I mentioned above; there is no solution in JavaScript.). There must be some specific issue(s) you came across, but without specifying what specifically made you perceive using Qt a huge time sink, the statement makes no claim.
- SXX 5y agoI don't have enough time to make extensive reply at this moment, but still wish to clarify a point that I trying to make here. Also I do like Qt and Qt Creator is my favorite IDE. And I wish there were less of electon apps that eating GBs of my RAM for no reason, but I also understand that our world is not perfect. So here is the problem: open source project usually mean that it's gonna be project with just single maintainer for quite some time unless it's get like really popular. So you gonna work on C++ codebase doing everything alone with limited resources. Qt have a lot of features, but it's still not comparable to what web stack has to offer. And if you take single external non-Qt library it's will make builds, deploy and testing so much more harder. And testing or debugging desktop software alone is huge pain in ass when it's cross platform. Running 3 different OS in VMs at least, etc. Is Qt bad or lack something compared to Electron? No, not at all. But for 95% of open source projects C++ simply wont work. Messing with CMake, packaging and platform-specific mess most likely just gonna sink the project long before single developer manage to get it to stable, usable and user-friendly state.