[Interest] Installation Sizes for Applications using Qt

Mitch Curtis mitch.curtis at qt.io
Thu Aug 26 08:58:54 CEST 2021


There is this useful website:

https://qtlite.com/

Pick e.g. Qt 5.15.x (it seems that the Qt 6 versions don't work with it), then the modules you use, and it will give you a complete list of every feature you can disable for that module.

Although like Thiago says, not all of them are guaranteed to result in a successful build. There are a huge number of combinations, and Qt's CI already has to test with lots of different target platforms, so it only checks a limited set of features. If you're going to disable a lot of features, you'll probably want to get comfortable with Qt's contribution process in order to fix any build breakages.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Interest <interest-bounces at qt-project.org> On Behalf Of Ben Cottrell
> Sent: Thursday, 26 August 2021 4:28 AM
> To: interest at qt-project.org
> Subject: [Interest] Installation Sizes for Applications using Qt
> 
> Qt is becoming more and more feature rich, but applications aren't getting
> any smaller. I wish there was easier ways of configuring and building Qt with
> shared libraries containing only the necessary functionality. Maybe more
> modularity is the answer.
> 
> I want to comply with the LGPL license, but I wish the libraries were smaller.
> I've tried building Qt from source, without success on GNU/Linux.
> 
> I've also tried Sciter, which is a single library for Microsoft Windows, Apple
> macOS and GNU/Linux. This and an executable using the library at runtime
> come in at around ~11MB.
> 
> On other systems where Qt libraries are not installed system wide, such as
> Microsoft Windows, it can be several times bigger in total.
> 
> I could use smaller libraries like Sciter, but I miss out on the versatility of Qt's
> API's, and it's implementations for all sorts of devices and operating systems.
> 
> Can we make it easier to reduce application installation sizes?
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