[Interest] What you don't like about Qt

[Jason H]

That's some brutal stuff. Comments interjected.

> Sent: Friday, October 14, 2016 at 9:40 AM
> From: "Roland Hughes" <roland at logikalsolutions.com>
> To: "Artem Sidyakin" <artem.sidyakin at qt.io>
> Cc: "interest at qt-project.org" <interest at qt-project.org>
> Subject: Re: [Interest] What you don't like about Qt
>
> 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.

You seem to confuse a bad developer, Agile, and QML. The fact is superfluous notify goes no where, so that's not the issue. I've used signals successfully on high availability HTTP[S] servers.  I don't see how Agile is an issue. A lot of older people (which you clearly are) have contempt for Agile. I've forcibly been dragged into Agile. I see it as valid, but not without shortcomings. But blaming agile for this is not appropriate. It's akin to an ad hominem attack or a strawman argument. 

> 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.)

This isn't necessarily so. Below the layer of Agile, are standard software engineering practices. Agile is just a project management style, it does not dictate software engineering practices. It seems that the software engineering practices are to blame.

> 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.

That's just javascript. And it is a valid criticism. That's why Microsoft invented TypeScript, and that's also why Google and Microsoft are writing Angular 2 in TypeScript. Though the runtime connections are a problem. Things like that can be validated with a unit and functional testing. 

> >> 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.

"On the CPU level the performance is similar to a 300 MHz Pentium II of 1997–99." The fact that Qt runs -at-all- on this Armv6 with 256Mb RAM should be considered a triumph. You simply cannot get ferarri speed out of Ford pinto without it ending badly.

While it is ok to be critical of Qt, please try to do it in a constructive manner. And as Thaigo always says: "patches are accepted"