8 ms·

Qt Creator 7 Released

40 points by conductor 5y ago

just-tom 5y ago
Just heard of QT. Has anyone tried it? It sounds too good to be true. What are the caviats?
- UltraViolence 5y ago
- flohofwoe 5y ago
  It's one of the oldest and most robust cross-platform C++ UI frameworks. The only caveat is that the company that's now behind Qt seems to have different goals than the (traditional) user community for the last decade or so.
- saidinesh5 5y ago
  I've used Qt for developing a few desktop apps, a couple of mobile apps and while working on a few embedded systems. The good: 1. Their QWidgets library is very stable and mature for cross platform desktop applications and i can still recommend it very much. I don't think there's a good enough alternative to it tbh. 2. For embedded systems in certain sectors (automotive, house appliances etc..) their QtQuick (with QML) is almost like the defacto standard. It is kind of like flutter but with a much better GUI describing language and very nice integration with C++. 3. Their C++ libraries and tools are also kind of nice when developing non GUI applications (networking, cli tools etc..), but these days C++ ecosystem has much nicer alternatives. Qt Creator is still my fav. C++ IDE though. The bad: 1. Using QtQuick for mobile application development is fine until it isn't. The ecosystem is a lot smaller than say flutter, react native etc... So you end up hand rolling various integrations yourself. 2. The licensing situation can be a bit of a headache when developing a commercial product. For eg. You cannot easily statically link your application with the open source offering, and you need to statically link when targeting iOS. 3. Licensing can be very expensive, even on embedded systems. LGPLv3 means you need to provide the end user a way to replace your Qt libraries and for many companies, that's a no go. So even today, i see a lot of companies still using the very old Qt 5.6 (when there was an LGPL v2 offering). If you're developing a desktop or Android application or an open source application, none of the licensing headaches should apply to you though. 4. With QtQuick, Qt Multimedia etc... things changed a lot during the last 5-6 years, so a lot of times the 3rd party libraries you find aren't that useful to you or are just half baked in the ecosystem. I'd still use Qt for my personal projects, but with all the licensing headaches i see more and more companies trying other alternatives. If you want to try out, try out QML: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qmlfirststeps.html https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qmlfirststeps.html
  - joezydeco 5y ago
    QML has finally become useful and efficient enough that developing on it is...kind of fun, actually. Sadly, like you mention, the rest of the ecosystem is languishing and the company's attention is elsewhere. Licensing has become a major headache (not just cost but terms) and I've grown tired of spending weeks and months trying to get it through management and explained properly.
  - Sakos 5y ago
    > LGPLv3 means you need to provide the end user a way to replace your Qt libraries and for many companies, that's a no go I assume you mean companies developing interfaces/applications for closed-down end-user systems like set-top boxes?
    - saidinesh5 5y ago
      Yep. It's a problem when building mobile applications too. Especially for iOS. Sailfish OS was stuck on Qt5.6 for a long time because of this.
- jollybean 5y ago
  A primary caveat is that it is a massive platform designed to do many things, in it's own flavour of C++. As far as UI programming goes, it's very slow moving. Once you get the right flavour chosen, it's not so bad. If you are making an app for a Kiosk, like a ticket console, that's not going to change every day, Qt is a good choice, it's well supported. For other things it's a tougher decision.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  It's by far the best desktop GUI toolkit. By a very wide margin. The main downside is that realistically you have to use C++, and it doesn't run nicely on the web like e.g. an Electron app would (something like Slack for example). Also QML is not very good - QtWidgets is much better unless you really need animations, but unfortunately QtWidgets is in maintenance mode.
KronisLV 5y ago
Here's the pricing page for Qt: https://www.qt.io/pricing https://www.qt.io/pricing Hmm, i could have sworn that years ago Qt Creator was free? But maybe i'm misremembering things...
- saidinesh5 5y ago
  It's still free under lgpl. Their open source version anyway. [1] Just that the Qt company lately has been trying everything to scare / annoy people into getting licenses, sign up for their online accounts etc... So they're just not advertising their open source offerings as much. 1. https://www.qt.io/download-open-source https://www.qt.io/download-open-source
  - nextaccountic 5y ago
    Why if I don't allow any audit, what they could do? They can't revoke the LGPL license, and there's nothing in the license that mandates such audits..
    - saidinesh5 5y ago
      I honestly don't know. I mean i routinely see so many GPL violations too and all i had to do was grep the binaries/update packages for strings like GPL. All i can tell you is most of the small-medium sized companies i worked for over the last few years are still using the very old and outdated Qt 5.6 just to avoid the newer LGPLv3 license. In fact i haven't heard of anyone who purchased a Qt Commercial license to date.
      - joezydeco 5y ago
        I'm a licensed commercial Qt developer, been so for about a decade now. My current org is still on 5.15 (the latest LTS release) and that's as far as we're going. I'm relieved they at least offered to go beyond 4.8 (the LGPL3 switchover) but that's mostly because other projects were already doing it. We're never going to Qt6, the newer licensing terms are just too much for us. Calling v5 old and outdated is subjective - we develop 2D interfaces on Linux framebuffer and that's good enough for the task. It's a bit sad that Qt is focused on 3D stacks and particle effects and acceleration and - mein gott in himmel - I just got an email about in-app advertising coming to Qt6. While core features and deficiencies in the system have gone unaddressed for years, sometimes nearly a decade. Sadly the next generation of our products will be going to React or Electron. So now we need to beef up our hardware and burn millions of unnecessary watts over the decades because we will need Node or some other backend server running on our little devices. They've won, and I'm sad about it.
npigrounet 5y ago
It's so expensive. Qt's pricing model is absolutely terrible.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dagmx 5y ago
  Qt Creator is free

40 points by conductor 5y ago

just-tom 5y ago

Just heard of QT. Has anyone tried it? It sounds too good to be true. What are the caviats?

UltraViolence 5y ago
flohofwoe 5y ago
It's one of the oldest and most robust cross-platform C++ UI frameworks. The only caveat is that the company that's now behind Qt seems to have different goals than the (traditional) user community for the last decade or so.
saidinesh5 5y ago
I've used Qt for developing a few desktop apps, a couple of mobile apps and while working on a few embedded systems. The good: 1. Their QWidgets library is very stable and mature for cross platform desktop applications and i can still recommend it very much. I don't think there's a good enough alternative to it tbh. 2. For embedded systems in certain sectors (automotive, house appliances etc..) their QtQuick (with QML) is almost like the defacto standard. It is kind of like flutter but with a much better GUI describing language and very nice integration with C++. 3. Their C++ libraries and tools are also kind of nice when developing non GUI applications (networking, cli tools etc..), but these days C++ ecosystem has much nicer alternatives. Qt Creator is still my fav. C++ IDE though. The bad: 1. Using QtQuick for mobile application development is fine until it isn't. The ecosystem is a lot smaller than say flutter, react native etc... So you end up hand rolling various integrations yourself. 2. The licensing situation can be a bit of a headache when developing a commercial product. For eg. You cannot easily statically link your application with the open source offering, and you need to statically link when targeting iOS. 3. Licensing can be very expensive, even on embedded systems. LGPLv3 means you need to provide the end user a way to replace your Qt libraries and for many companies, that's a no go. So even today, i see a lot of companies still using the very old Qt 5.6 (when there was an LGPL v2 offering). If you're developing a desktop or Android application or an open source application, none of the licensing headaches should apply to you though. 4. With QtQuick, Qt Multimedia etc... things changed a lot during the last 5-6 years, so a lot of times the 3rd party libraries you find aren't that useful to you or are just half baked in the ecosystem. I'd still use Qt for my personal projects, but with all the licensing headaches i see more and more companies trying other alternatives. If you want to try out, try out QML: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qmlfirststeps.html https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qmlfirststeps.html
- joezydeco 5y ago
  QML has finally become useful and efficient enough that developing on it is...kind of fun, actually. Sadly, like you mention, the rest of the ecosystem is languishing and the company's attention is elsewhere. Licensing has become a major headache (not just cost but terms) and I've grown tired of spending weeks and months trying to get it through management and explained properly.
- Sakos 5y ago
  > LGPLv3 means you need to provide the end user a way to replace your Qt libraries and for many companies, that's a no go I assume you mean companies developing interfaces/applications for closed-down end-user systems like set-top boxes?
  - saidinesh5 5y ago
    Yep. It's a problem when building mobile applications too. Especially for iOS. Sailfish OS was stuck on Qt5.6 for a long time because of this.
jollybean 5y ago
A primary caveat is that it is a massive platform designed to do many things, in it's own flavour of C++. As far as UI programming goes, it's very slow moving. Once you get the right flavour chosen, it's not so bad. If you are making an app for a Kiosk, like a ticket console, that's not going to change every day, Qt is a good choice, it's well supported. For other things it's a tougher decision.
IshKebab 5y ago
It's by far the best desktop GUI toolkit. By a very wide margin. The main downside is that realistically you have to use C++, and it doesn't run nicely on the web like e.g. an Electron app would (something like Slack for example). Also QML is not very good - QtWidgets is much better unless you really need animations, but unfortunately QtWidgets is in maintenance mode.

KronisLV 5y ago

Here's the pricing page for Qt: https://www.qt.io/pricing https://www.qt.io/pricing Hmm, i could have sworn that years ago Qt Creator was free? But maybe i'm misremembering things...

saidinesh5 5y ago
It's still free under lgpl. Their open source version anyway. [1] Just that the Qt company lately has been trying everything to scare / annoy people into getting licenses, sign up for their online accounts etc... So they're just not advertising their open source offerings as much. 1. https://www.qt.io/download-open-source https://www.qt.io/download-open-source
- nextaccountic 5y ago
  Why if I don't allow any audit, what they could do? They can't revoke the LGPL license, and there's nothing in the license that mandates such audits..
  - saidinesh5 5y ago
    I honestly don't know. I mean i routinely see so many GPL violations too and all i had to do was grep the binaries/update packages for strings like GPL. All i can tell you is most of the small-medium sized companies i worked for over the last few years are still using the very old and outdated Qt 5.6 just to avoid the newer LGPLv3 license. In fact i haven't heard of anyone who purchased a Qt Commercial license to date.
    - joezydeco 5y ago
      I'm a licensed commercial Qt developer, been so for about a decade now. My current org is still on 5.15 (the latest LTS release) and that's as far as we're going. I'm relieved they at least offered to go beyond 4.8 (the LGPL3 switchover) but that's mostly because other projects were already doing it. We're never going to Qt6, the newer licensing terms are just too much for us. Calling v5 old and outdated is subjective - we develop 2D interfaces on Linux framebuffer and that's good enough for the task. It's a bit sad that Qt is focused on 3D stacks and particle effects and acceleration and - mein gott in himmel - I just got an email about in-app advertising coming to Qt6. While core features and deficiencies in the system have gone unaddressed for years, sometimes nearly a decade. Sadly the next generation of our products will be going to React or Electron. So now we need to beef up our hardware and burn millions of unnecessary watts over the decades because we will need Node or some other backend server running on our little devices. They've won, and I'm sad about it.

npigrounet 5y ago

It's so expensive. Qt's pricing model is absolutely terrible.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dagmx 5y ago
Qt Creator is free