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

[Bo Thorsen]

Den 20-01-2016 kl. 15:12 skrev 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.

It sounds like everyone completely agrees on this. But that doesn't mean 
it has to happen for every single class that might be implemented in STL.

> 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 accelerates, so will the need to phase out Qt features that got superseded.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 agree with this, but there might be problems with the release cycle of 
Qt here. It's impossible to keep backwards compatibility while we switch 
to new C++ versions. So either the Qt major releases will start 
happening more often, or there are features that will just have to wait. 
Thiagos list of things he has already implemented for Qt 6 is a good 
example of this.

> 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?

Why do you think people hate C++? I love C++ but I hate the string 
classes. I like some part of the std containers, I don't like their API.

In the same category of argument, I love Qt, but I hate that we don't 
use exceptions.

Bo Thorsen,
Director, Viking Software.

-- 
Viking Software
Qt and C++ developers for hire
http://www.vikingsoft.eu