[Interest] Small survey on necessary Qt Container size

Roland Hughes roland at logikalsolutions.com
Wed Sep 7 13:24:33 CEST 2022


On 9/7/22 05:00, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> On Tuesday, 6 September 2022 06:24:19 PDT Michael Jackson wrote:
>> My guess is that if you are NOT in the data processing realm the Qt
>> containers are probably just fine for your use cases.
> I don't know why Andr? decided to ask about Qt containers, since they already
> do support 64-bit sizes.
>
> The discussion on the development mailing list is not about the low-level
> containers, but about the GUI types.

Probably because the widget must contain the data in something, but that 
is just a guess.

What isn't a guess is your row numbers need to be BASE-26 for table widgets.

60,000,000,000

is going to chew up quite a bit of screen for a line number. (That's 
sixty Billion for those counting commas.)

Honestly, it is too late for Qt to find its way into corporate desktop 
applications. There are legacy applications like Wireshark

https://github.com/wireshark/wireshark

that will be maintained until someone ports them to CopperSpice, LVGL, 
Elementary, etc. Same with Geany and a few others. Given the licensing 
shenanigans, elimination of OpenSource LTS, and severely limited data 
capabilities, it will never again be the tool of choice for new 
corporate or embedded development. Even basic order entry systems must 
have the capability to reference a data warehouse so the customer can 
look up their past orders.

Despite offering boot2qt, all of the major SOM module makers have been 
steering customers away from that.

So, I guess the real question, before one gets to "capacity" is

what market hasn't Qt gotten itself thrown out of yet?

That will determine how much capacity your widgets and containers must have.

If you (being Qt) could ___directly__ access the full capabilities of 
Mumps and PICK BASIC databases you "could" become the tool of choice for 
medical records systems development. You would have to do it very 
quickly though. Almost every major hospital system is paying to keep 
Windows 7 alive so they can avoid a very expensive Epic/etc. software 
upgrade combined with a Windows 10/11 upgrade.

https://www.epic.com/software

Most hospitals would love to be able to leave their existing Dell 
all-in-one systems in place, load Manjaro (or some other somewhat secure 
Linux) on them and load high quality medical records software that could 
use the existing database sans conversion. Despite what MS says publicly 
about 2023 being the end of the end, hospitals will be able to get 
another 2-5 years as will federal offices and they will all ride it out 
to the bitter end.

Licensing shenanigans got Qt tossed out of the embedded world and the 
phone market.

Toyota threw them out of the automotive world.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toyota-tech-idUSKBN18R1CW

Even if Qt was absolutely free, draconian size limitations mean it 
cannot be used to access corporate data so cannot be used for corporate 
desktops.

What market is Qt actually targeting now? That determines what the 
capabilities need to be. Given the licensing, it will have to be an 
incredibly obscure niche with deep pockets. Nothing else will pay those 
fees.

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

http://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com
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