Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

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I also don't believe in RN and for me Flutter is the last hope of keeping Dart relevant outside the Googleplex.

I don't see any reason to waste my time with Dart. It was a good decision to focus on JavaScript back then, and it is more so in the context of native apps.

Regarding Qt, when I tried it about 4 years ago, I was quite disappointed with their mobile support, because they only had the bare minimum, and integrating the platform APIs meant in the end the effort was bigger than just doing C++ plus native views.

Meanwhile they seem to have switched focus to customers that are actually willing to pay for their tooling, thus hardware manufactures selling medical, IoT and automobile devices, as one can easily see from the upcoming Qt World Summit schedule.

At personal level I have been using the former approach of C++ plus native views, while at work our mobile projects have been either Ionic based or plain mobile web sites.

Still weighting to switch back to Qt or adopt Xamarin for hobby projects, although with Google and Microsoft pulling their weight behind PWAs, I am starting to think that might be the future for all mobile apps that aren't performance critical, given WebAssembly and access to device APIs without additional FFI when authenticated.

How was your mobile Qt experience been?

WebAssembly on-device might be a game changer for performance critical apps. I'll happily welcome it when I see it, but I'm not holding my breath.

The thing is that most things coming from Web just moves faster, and there's so many more resources available for the 95% app. For all of that JS kinda makes sense. It just comes with a bad upbringing and poor manners, when seen through the glasses of considering a phone as an "embedded" device with resource restrictions. Performance is always seems an afterthought in most things web. And that's understandable, because even the baseline resource usage, as fast and small as you can get on a Javascript runtime, is still above what I'd consider acceptable. It just isn't for most apps out there and people have sort of gotten used to charging their phones mid-way through the day.

Qt definitely isn't perfect, and it can be a bit of a pain to work with. QtCreator is just... and there's no live reloading.

The good thing is that runs really fast on the machine you're already working on, so most of the time you just work on the Desktop windowed version anyway.

I wish there's was a bigger selection of UI frameworks available though. For mobile there's Qt Quick Controls 2, which is quite good, but not at all as expansive as what you have available on the web for instance.

I do think though, that if Qt doesn't do something about their tooling and ecosystem, that they'll get run into the ground when some of these other frameworks bridges the gap to some of the features that Qt is still unique in having.

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