[Development] The future of smart pointers in Qt API

[Vitaly Fanaskov]

I think that moving Qt smart pointers to Qt5Compat module creates almost 
no hassle. For Qt users it should be a one line in the terminal to 
replace includes in their code bases (probably also prepend a namespace 
to classes' names, but I'm not sure if there is a namespace).

In general, I'd say that this is another problem should be addressed 
separately. Feel free to kick off a new thread.

My personal opinion on this topic is that Qt has wrong release cycle 
now. We should make a major release each year (and this year is a good 
time in terms of marketing :) ). The text you quoted is about fighting 
with consequences rather than about fixing a cause.

On 2/12/20 7:37 PM, André Pönitz wrote:
> 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'

-- 
Best Regards,

Fanaskov Vitaly
Senior Software Engineer

The Qt Company / Qt Quick and Widgets Team