[Development] Changing qreal to a float

[BRM]

> From: "lars.knoll at nokia.com" <lars.knoll at nokia.com>

> On 2/16/12 6:21 PM, "ext Girish Ramakrishnan" 
> <girish at forwardbias.in>
> wrote:
> 
>> Hi Lars,
>> 
>> On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 5:03 AM,  <lars.knoll at nokia.com> wrote:
>>>  On 2/16/12 12:16 PM, "ext Giuseppe D'Angelo" 
> <dangelog at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On 15 February 2012 22:56, Sean Harmer <sh at theharmers.co.uk> 
> wrote:
>>>>>  On 15/02/2012 11:53, andre.poenitz at nokia.com wrote:
>>>>>>  Anyway. It's probably better to go for any kind of 
> uniformity. If
>>>>>> that's single precision, it should be made clear  that
>>>>>> QPolygonF/QRectF
>>>>>> are not meant for applications needing "polygons" 
> in general. Maybe
>>>>>> one
>>>>>> should consider adding some QPolygonD/QRectD/... later to 
> get the
>>>>>> functionality back. Until these exist, it might be 
> worthwhile to keep
>>>>>> the (then unconditional) typedef though, to allow easy 
> creation of
>>>>>> custom builds of Qt with double precision coordinates.
>>>>> 
>>>>>  Why not make these classes into templates and have typedefs for 
> the
>>>>>  float and double cases? It always confused me why 
> QVector<n>D mixed
>>>>>  qreals and floats.
>>>> 
>>>> I agree, although typedefs will unfortunately break all forward
>>>> declarations...
>>> 
>>>  That would break quite a bit of code, so I'm against it.
>>> 
>>>  It's not a big deal to simply add the QRectD, etc. types if 
> required.
>>> 
>>>  In any case, here's the patch to close the issue:
>>>  http://codereview.qt-project.org/16551
>>> 
>> 
>> I thought we were agreeing upon deprecating qreal (i.e leave it as-is)
>> and use float and double explicitly inside Qt. At least, that's what I
>> +1d for :) The patch above changes qreal and doesn't deprecate it.
> 
> We need to do this in steps. Right now, this would break signal/slot
> connections wherever a real type is being used (because of the string
> based matching). Kent is working on improvements to the metaobject system
> (see http://codereview.qt-project.org/#change,14763). Once that is in I
> can do the s/qreal/float/ in all of Qt without breaking connections that
> still use qreal for arguments because the new format stores the actual
> type and not the string.

The concerns are not the signals/slots. Yes, that is one aspect.
The concern is other code that uses qreal - e.g. people embedding it in binary protocols, or using it in printf()'s, etc.
The vast majority of Qt is probably in the desktop arena, and there qreal is a double; and it's probably relied on that way.
There have also been numerous other concerns raised in this thread about why it is not a good idea to simply make qreal a float.

I agree that the better approach is to simply deprecate qreal and use float and double explicitly instead.
Leave qreal in there for now using its existing functionality; mark it deprecated; and in then in 6.0 remove it entirely. (I doubt that could be done in a 5.x point release.)
If anything, the metaobject system should printout warnings about qreal being deprecated when used in a signal/slot; the build system probably should too.

Ben