[Development] What kind of airplane we want to build?

[Marc Mutz]

On Wednesday 20 January 2016 11:48:20 Bubke Marco wrote:
> I think it would be productive for the discussion to build story of what we
> want to do. A story of the big picture. Maybe as a first step we can show
> how we tackle problems with Qt 5 and what are the proposed technologies in
> the future C++ standard. 

For me, Qt always was "the C++ standard library that C++ lacked". Ever since 
Qt 3, it also integrated pretty well with the rest of the standard library. 
That was easy, because pretty much the only thing that the standard library 
had and Qt didn't were the algorithms, and Qt and the STL algorithms 
integrated well. And there were conversion functions for pretty much 
everything to/from std.

We even deprecated our algorithms when we started requiring full C++98 support 
in 5.0.

We used to roll our own atomics, but dropped them in 5.7 when we required 
partial C++11 support. We rolled our own foreach, and now it looks like we're 
dropping it in favour of range-for.

I would like that trend to continue. The likely next candidates are threads, 
futures and locks.

Now that C++ punches out a new standard every three years, I would change that 
into "Qt is the part of the C++ standard library that C++ sill lacks". I would 
like Qt to continue to integrate well with the standard library and phase out 
its own solutions as the standard library catches up.

We have been doing that in the past. It's just as C++ standardisation 
accelerates, so will the need to phase out Qt features that got superseded.

I perceive, however, that for many people, Qt is what makes them forget 
they're working on C++, a language they would not otherwise poke at with a 
long stick. They probably also cannot tolerate writing std::sort(v.begin(), 
v.end()) instead of qSort(v). But Qt is available in D and Python, too, so ... 
why do they use C++ if they so hate it?

Thanks,
Marc

-- 
Marc Mutz <marc.mutz at kdab.com> | Senior Software Engineer
KDAB (Deutschland) GmbH & Co.KG, a KDAB Group Company
Tel: +49-30-521325470
KDAB - The Qt Experts