[Development] The future of smart pointers in Qt API

[André Pönitz]

On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 11:13:17AM +0000, Vitaly Fanaskov wrote:
> >> We should also move Qt smart pointers to Qt5Compat module. The
> >> destiny of QPointer is not well defined so far.
> >
> > This was not part of the research and should probably discussed
> > separately.
>
> I agree. But if we decide using standard smart pointers, why
> should we keep Qt smart pointers as a part of Qt6?

https://www.qt.io/blog/2019/08/07/technical-vision-qt-6

 "Compatibility with older versions is extremely important and is a
  major requirement when we develop Qt 6. There are billions of lines
  of code written using our framework and any incompatible change we
  do will thus have a cost for our users. Furthermore, the more work
  the change to Qt 6 requires from our users the slower the adoption
  will be, which leads to more cost on our side to maintain the last
  version of Qt 5."

Already now the jump from, say, 5.12 to Qt dev is way bigger than
the whole Qt 4 -> Qt 5 upgrade was, adding more to that does
definitely not help with Qt 6 adoption.

Andre'