[Interest] QGraphicsView and OpenGL in Qt6

[Filippo Rusconi]

Greetings, everybody,

>Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2023 17:03:04 -0800
>From: Michael Jackson <mike.jackson at bluequartz.net>
>To: Shawn Rutledge <Shawn.Rutledge at qt.io>
>Cc: Yauheni Pervenenka via Interest <interest at qt-project.org>
>Subject: Re: [Interest] QGraphicsView and OpenGL in Qt6
>
> <hot take>
>I’d like to chime in with a real world application that we have been
>developing. It has a VTK based 3D rendering engine inside a Qt application
>that is widget based. It did not start out great. We burnt 10 months with
>3~4 engineers trying to develop this application as a QML desktop
>application and it was just one thing after another in QML that just would
>stop us in our tracks. QML on Desktop just isn’t as mature as Widgets on
>the Desktop and suggesting for someone to rewrite a generally well working
>desktop application to QML is not just a huge disservice but would be a
>huge mistake. We ended up taking the last 2 months of the contract and spun
>up a widgets based application and got more features completed for the
>client in those 2 months than we did with 10 months of QML development. I
>know things change but after that little exercise I am not sure anyone
>would ever convince me to try QML on the desktop again. Period. If QWidgets
>goes away we would probably just move to another language all together
>rather than try QML. QML on Phones and tablets? Sure. Go for it. Desktop,
>stay away. Far Far away.
></hot take>
>
>And ironically enough, our application will also be trying to render large
>tiled mosaics through VTK. Our tiled images are 2K x 2K each and our data
>sets are upwards of 500 to 700 tiles at this point. The QTable idea sounds
>interesting. I would have to research how to render the table inside an
>OpenGL scene.

[...]

Thank you so much for your insightful message. It is indeed months (years?) that
I am pondering if time has come for a switch. Then I would look for Qml elements
available that would somehow replicate widgets like tree views and such. I would
systematically feel like "no, we are not there yet". 

But the real reason I comment on your message is this:

>I know things change but after that little exercise I am not sure anyone
>would ever convince me to try QML on the desktop again. Period. If QWidgets
>goes away we would probably just move to another language all together
>rather than try QML. QML on Phones and tablets? Sure. Go for it. Desktop,
>stay away. Far Far away.

+1000

It is some time now that I feel like Qt going the Qml route in a preferred
manner with respect to the QWidget route (more revenues, I guess). I hope I am
wrong with this feeling. I would be terribly sorry to have to adopt a new
library set for widgetry...

Sincerely,
Filippo

-- 
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀  Filippo Rusconi, PhD
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁   Research scientist at CNRS
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀   Debian Developer
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀  http://msxpertsuite.org
           http://www.debian.org