[Interest] the path forward (or is it "how the things, look"?)

[Roland Hughes]

On 4/12/21 5:14 AM, Thiago Macieira wrote:
>   Roland is asking we don't, but it's simply
> not an option for the Open Source project. So we have two choices:

It is an option. Notably not a pleasant one.

Please read previous message discussing Abstraction and "Naperville 
divorce."

When XCB became too much effort to bundle in with Qt so developers using 
Qt didn't have to care what was under the hood, it was time for a full 
divorce and replacement with a different underlying package. Admittedly 
the effort wouldn't be free, but it was time to rip the bandage off.

What you choose to use under the hood is of little concern to high level 
Qt application developers as long as we don't have to touch it. The 
Naperville Divorce of XCB made certain we all had to touch it. Sticking 
with XCB is really what torpedoed Scott. From what little I've 
researched there are ways to get much newer compilers on RHEL 6.

Some competitors are putting Vulkan under the hood to get graphics, 3D, 
and GPU access. According to the page below it is also on Andriod

https://www.khronos.org/vulkan/

Another in this thread listed quite a list of cross platform GUI libraries.

Again, ripping XCB out won't be a free effort even if the new library is 
free as in beer, but the current situation with XCB is kind of at the 
heart of everything when one steps back for a few days.

The state of Qt3D has already been dumped on quite succinctly. Yes, some 
of the details may not have been 100% accurate but the outside world 
view of it being the ugly red headed stepchild chained in the basement 
was spot on.

Jason and others have already painted a rather abysmal picture for Android.

It's time to relinquish the GUI part of Qt to a Highlander (There can be 
only one) and let it straddle the underlying video architectures on all 
platforms. Instead focus on the parts of Qt that actually make 
applications. The only GUI part you need to provide is consistent Styles 
support, assuming your chosen underlying GUI library does not.

You should be able to maintain more than 90% high level API 
compatibility yet jettison all of the low level graphics support in 
favor of one really good cross platform GUI library.

Scott, could you poke around and see what 4K supporting GUI libraries 
exist on RHEL 6? From an academic perspective it would be interesting to 
find out. That would identify what has been chasing 4K the longest.

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

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