[Development] The future of smart pointers in Qt API

[Karsten Heimrich]

-----Original Message-----
>From: André Pönitz <apoenitz at t-online.de> 
>Sent: Mittwoch, 12. Februar 2020 19:38 Uhr
>To: Vitaly Fanaskov <vitaly.fanaskov at qt.io>
>Cc: Karsten Heimrich <Karsten.Heimrich at qt.io>; development at qt-project.org
>Subject: Re: [Development] The future of smart pointers in Qt API
>
>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.

We probably could move it to Qt5Compat first, so that lifetime ends with Qt6. But as mentioned already, we did not even discuss anything there like...

-- Karsten