[Interest] Future of Qt with Ios

[Gunnar Sletta]

On 12 Sep 2014, at 02:10, Karl Loveridge <KLoveridge at eatsleepplay.biz> wrote:

> I’m really rooting for Qt. I love it so far. I’ve invested about 7 months into a project using Qt. But I’m having some doubts that I wonder if anyone could help me with.
> 
> I’m concerned that Qt and the iOS are a bit at odds with each other. For instance, Apple just announced iOS 8. Try to find information about how Qt is going to handle the new OS change. I can’t find anything. Is Qt planning on supporting Metal (which is Apple’s new OpenGL replacement—which is 10x faster than OpenGL)—which is exclusively Apple. Just questions like these bother me that there isn’t “buzz” happening around Qt.
> 
> Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Metal being an Apple only API, it makes little sense for us to make any kind of wrapper around it. I would assume that since we give access to the native window handle through QWindow's API, you can make use of Metal inside a Qt application. I doubt however, that Qt will make use of it itself in the immediate future. 

The scene graph for instance, is OpenGL based and will continue to be so. It gives us great performance in addition to portability (with some help from ANGLE). And its not like Qt would become 10x faster just by using Metal. In addition to taking what comes out of Apple with a grain of sail, rendering is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to performance, at least since 5.2 :)

> With my project, I’m at a bit of a cross roads. Its written with Qt at its heart. The hope was to have a nice environment to make a Apple/Android app. But I’m feeling a little hesitant about the direction I’m going in.

I wouldn't have any qualms. Qt and Qt Quick tries very hard to run well everywhere.

cheers,
Gunnar