[Interest] Interest Digest, Vol 114, Issue 23

[Tuukka Turunen]

Hi,

Feedback on the Qt 6 API is valuable and we are very interested in it. Portability was one of the key design principles and we have avoided making changes when not needed. That said, there can surely be some items that are unnecessarily changed.

Knowing what is the problem and the intended use case helps to have this discussion. Our API review process is fully open, but it is natural that users do not want to necessarily engage in it. So we welcome the feedback on the API also now and will try to seek ways to improve based on it.

Yours,

Tuukka

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Lähettäjä: Interest <interest-bounces at qt-project.org> käyttäjän Turtle Creek Software <support at turtlesoft.com> puolesta
Lähetetty: tiistaina, maaliskuuta 23, 2021 1:36 ap.
Vastaanottaja: interest at qt-project.org
Aihe: Re: [Interest] Interest Digest, Vol 114, Issue 23

Re: willy-nilly

I find this discussion interesting, because we ranted on the Cocoa-dev list for a while and probably sounded a lot like Roland.  That was after we spent 3 years porting our C++ desktop app from Mac Carbon to Cocoa, and barely got half done.  With huge effort we might have finished about now, just in time for M1, Swift and SwiftUI rewrites. It seemed prudent to give up instead.

Many people seem to be looking for the same thing: a stable platform that will stick around for a decade or more. They're not finding it, in Qt or anywhere.  Summed up in this post:

https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/sad-state-of-cross-platform-gui-frameworks/

After leaving Cocoa behind, we tried updating our Windows app with MFC. That was a horrible year. WinUi3 promises to make C++ apps easier but it probably will stay vapor or be bungled.  So we tried Qt.

After 8 months, so far it is working great for our needs. We may even ship something by late 2021.  But Qt's long-term future seems rather grim, and that is very discouraging.  We have 15 programmer-years of cross-platform business logic that's pining away for lack of a decent GUI framework that sticks around for long enough to recoup the investment.

I can relate to anyone who is unhappy about deprecated functions.  It is never fun when existing code breaks.  We want to be inventing new stuff, not going back and fixing old code just to stay in the same place.  The C++ language has been decent about advancing, but still keeping ancient code stable.  Windows bends over backwards to stay backwards compatible. I think it's a basic courtesy that all platforms owe to developers.  Programming is hard. Doing things once should be enough.

We know a lot about construction, accounting and estimating, and enough about programming to make useful software for it. But we need tools that let us spend time creating actual solutions.  Not reinventing wheels just to have the same GUI.

Casey McDermott
TurtleSoft.com
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