[Interest] rebooted QtWebKit for Qt4??

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Sunday July 12 2020 18:02:00 Donald Carr wrote:

>@rene: I would recommend reading:

Remember, I didn't know about CopperSpice until a few days ago. Does it interest me as an alternative, sure, but not as anything more than that.
Also please remember that my post was about QtWebKit.

>to contextualize Copperspice's "wins"

Well, something that just took me about 30 hours to build on my slowboat linux beater (with clang 6) can definitely be considered a win of *sorts* ... in winter ;)
(Can't remember all-inclusive Qt4 builds ever taking that long...)

>It is sad to see people miss the necessity for hardware accelerated UI
>that QML addresses; Qt widgets backing onto QPainter was extremely

So we get a HW accelerated UI behind an interpreted language, and that you can apparently make to look like the regular widgets UI by adding a widgets-based theme on top of it?

>Feel free to hate on QML, just be aware you appear to be missing the
>driving impetus behind it which was not fashion but necessity.

I don't hate on QML per se, but I do abhor the fashionable way UIs built with it look. I use a widget style (QtCurve) which is definitely not one of the fastest, configured to give one of the most compact layouts with still some traditional 3D look to it, vaguely inspired by the OS X 10.9 UI in "graphite" mode. I won't have "crazy res" displays until they become the standard in consumer-grade computing hardware so I guess the necessity of having a more hw-accelerated UI than the current OpenGL-based widget implementation allows is very relative for me.

More generally speaking: GUIs are inherently slow compared to the processes they provide handles to, and that's rarely a problem (because they rarely make the user wait on moderately recent hardware) unless *) you start to want to do things I can only call fashionable bread and games for the masses (UI animations and the like). I have yet to find applications where you *need* expensive animations. No, I'm not an expert in this field, but I used to be an expert in fields *underlying* human factors *research*.

*) or unless you want/need to use remote displaying over X11. That tends to be problematic, but I think that's actually because of attempts to accelerate the UI, so I doubt QML will do better there.

>Widgets is "done"; it is kinda hard to get a more stable API than one
>which is no longer being actively developed.

I also didn't complain about stability, but coming from fundamental research I can relate to the feeling that API breakage of the type Qt3 -> Qt4 -> Qt5 (and who knows what Qt6 has in stock) happens too fast, too soon.

R