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>Browsers were never supposed to be full application runtimes, and yet we (as an industry) keep doubling down on it Web technologies are multi-platfrorm, widel

>Browsers were never supposed to be full application runtimes, and yet we (as an industry) keep doubling down on it Web technologies are multi-platfrorm, widely accessible, has an unmatched UI API, has great tooling and a large ecosystem. It's the path of least resistance. Contrast this with something like Qt, which is an absolute pain to compile and is riddled with bugs. It's GUI library is mature, but nowhere near the web. Time is money, and developers are many times more expensive than the extra cpu cycles the web consumes.

dgfitz 2y ago
> Contrast this with something like Qt, which is an absolute pain to compile and is riddled with bugs. Compiling qt is a choice, there are many, many ways to get precompiled libs. Also, it is only hard to compile if you’re not familiar with ./configure, it is actually absurdly easy to compile and link against qt. As for the bugs thing, sure, qt has bugs. So does _all other software_ and this is a very strange argument to make on your end.
- yupyupyups 2y ago
  I would say, for serious development you should know how to compile the thing. Because some bugs cannot be worked around without actually patching the library. Qt has many dependencies, and it's not always clear which libraries are needed for any particular functionality. Try compiling the documentation and setting up the code examples properly in Qt Creator, it's not that easy and the instrucrions on how to do that are incomplete. >As for the bugs thing, sure, qt has bugs. So does _all other software_ and this is a very strange argument to make on your end. Most mature software do not expose their bugs early to their users. Qt has occationally some really silly bugs that pop up across versions that simply shouldn't be there if you have proper QA. When they kept away LTS updates from non-paying users, this I would argue risked becoming a bigger issue. I don't want to talk bad about Qt, it's actually a really awesome library. But it has its quirks that are timeconsuming to work around, which can hinder wider adoption. That was all I was trying to say. Note, I would actually recommend it if someone is interrested in building native applications with good performance, and is comfortable with C++, alternatively I would suggest a Python wrapper such as pyside to mitigate many of the issues I was talking about.

dgfitz 2y ago

> Contrast this with something like Qt, which is an absolute pain to compile and is riddled with bugs. Compiling qt is a choice, there are many, many ways to get precompiled libs. Also, it is only hard to compile if you’re not familiar with ./configure, it is actually absurdly easy to compile and link against qt. As for the bugs thing, sure, qt has bugs. So does _all other software_ and this is a very strange argument to make on your end.

yupyupyups 2y ago
I would say, for serious development you should know how to compile the thing. Because some bugs cannot be worked around without actually patching the library. Qt has many dependencies, and it's not always clear which libraries are needed for any particular functionality. Try compiling the documentation and setting up the code examples properly in Qt Creator, it's not that easy and the instrucrions on how to do that are incomplete. >As for the bugs thing, sure, qt has bugs. So does _all other software_ and this is a very strange argument to make on your end. Most mature software do not expose their bugs early to their users. Qt has occationally some really silly bugs that pop up across versions that simply shouldn't be there if you have proper QA. When they kept away LTS updates from non-paying users, this I would argue risked becoming a bigger issue. I don't want to talk bad about Qt, it's actually a really awesome library. But it has its quirks that are timeconsuming to work around, which can hinder wider adoption. That was all I was trying to say. Note, I would actually recommend it if someone is interrested in building native applications with good performance, and is comfortable with C++, alternatively I would suggest a Python wrapper such as pyside to mitigate many of the issues I was talking about.