[Interest] promoting a QGuiApplication to a QApplication?

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Wed, 11 Jul 2018 08:01:25 -0700, Thiago Macieira wrote:

> There's no such C++ concept as "promote a class". What you're asking is
> not possible.

I think I got confused myself with dynamic_cast, but of course what I had 
in mind was not modifying the instance itself, but create a new 
QApplication instance from the original QGuiApplication instance. That's 
what dynamic_cast also does when it doesn't simply return the original 
pointer, no?


I have now seen from the code that this would probably be possible but not 
without refactoring.

As I wrote in a private reply, maybe that one day it will be concluded 
that QGuiApplication could be rolled into QApplication (because what's a 
GUI application without widgets of some kind?). From an admittedly cursory 
glance at qapplication.cpp it seems that a QApplication initialised with a 
"noWidgets" flag would be largely identical to a QGuiApplication instance. 
It also seems that the widget-related initialisations could be deferred 
until they're actually needed in which case every QApplication would start 
out as a QGuiApplication.

Maybe in Qt 7? :)

R.