[Interest] What you don't like about Qt

[Roland Hughes]

On 09/23/2016 11:11 AM, Artem Sidyakin wrote:
>> Digia
>  From the 1st of May it’s The Qt Company now :)
Thank you for that information.
>
>> NOBODY will pay royalties, period
> Participating in calls and meetings with customers, I see a different picture.
Having been in IT over 30 years now working as a consultant for I don't 
even remember how many companies, both Fortune 50 and those with < 35 
people, I have never encountered one. I have encountered thousands which 
will spend "reasonable amounts" on toolkits which provide unlimited and 
unrestricted use, but not one which would pay per-item royalties.

If one lives long enough you can see the same mistakes repeated at least 
3 times. This per item royalty notion got floated during the 
mainframe/mid-range go-go days. Pretty much every company which floated 
the notion died a quick and horrible death.

During the DOS and GUI-DOS (Windows 3.x and earlier were NOT operating 
systems they were launched via C:\win) a whole rash of companies tried 
this royalty thing. Developers had no problem paying huge (for the time) 
dollars getting commercial grade compilers and tools, but would not pay 
one red cent in royalties. I remember having spent big bucks on .RTLink 
like many of my clients and most of the Fortune 100. .RTLink decided 
none of us had paid enough so they tried to move to a royalty scheme. I 
stress the word "tried." Almost overnight the industry switched to 
Blinker. You know what? I did a Web search before writing this. Blinker 
is _still_ being sold. Yes, people still do DOS development, I turned 
down a contract for it less than a month ago. Various DOS flavors run an 
awful lot of expensive embedded devices. Stuff which starts at 1/4 
million dollars and goes up from there.

http://www.grafxsoft.com/2blinker.htm

Here is the only thing I could find on .RTLink after a 5 minute search 
with multiple search engines.
http://corphist.computerhistory.org/corphist/documents/doc-43e9481924779.pdf

The same story is true for pretty much every tool of the day which tried 
the royalty path.
>> arthritic dog running in deep snow called QML
>> script kiddies
> I find the concept of dividing the application to front-end (QML) and back-end (C++) very convenient and helpful. That was a truly brilliant idea to implement such concept in Qt.
> I used same approach being .NET/ASP.MVC developer back in my days. But I guess, I’m just a script-kiddy, so it explains.
It was an ill thought out disaster prone to catastrophe leaving massive 
quantities of signals firing off into the mist and developers hoping 
they don't kill the neighbor's dog. I'm at a client which is suffering 
from just such a QML with Agile catastrophe. One developer (who is no 
longer here, possibly not employed as a programmer anywhere now) drank 
the QML Kool-aid and was making everything in the back end a property 
with NOTIFY signals even if it had absolutely NOTHING to do with user 
interaction.

Various other developers have come along and tried to clean up this 
monstrosity which fails spasticly in the field. (Agile _always_ produces 
a catastrophe when used for any system of consequence.)

Guess what? There is no text editor one can use or bag of dried chicken 
bones one can shake to identify NOTIFY signals which are unused. One 
developer made the mistake of trusting the IDE search. A lot of NOTIFY 
signals which were actually in use went away.

Guess what? QML provides zero, count them zero methods of compile time 
verification for signal connections. The _only_ way of identifying these 
problems is to have a console connected to your embedded devices AND be 
watching real close. Despite all of the efforts to provide compile time 
diagnostics to the connect() statement, Qt went and added this rotted 
fish of an interface called QML which provides _nothing_ to assist 
making stable systems lives quite literally depend on.
>
>> Just take a look at how badly QML runs on the Raspberry Pi with a quad core and Gig of RAM.
>> http://www.logikalsolutions.com/wordpress/information-technology/raspberry-qt-part-12-qml-blows-big-stinky-chunks/
> Yeah, this link was here before. Author was asked back then, how about benchmarking Qt Quick Controls 2? But I don’t remember his answer to that.
> I have a stock RPi 3 on my desk and I use it in my development with QML. Cannot really complain about anything.
Speaking as the author, his answer was the code was up on the site in a 
Zip file and those who wanted to try it on a Raspberry Pi using 
libraries not in the current Pi repos were welcome to run their own 
tests posting the results here. The resounding silence means they 
achieved the same sucky outcome.

-- 
Roland Hughes, President
Logikal Solutions
(630)-205-1593

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