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Comment by Memosyne | Hacker News Reader

As much as I enjoy working with Qt, I wouldn't bet on it for the future. QML support still seems a bit iffy and being told QWidgets are being phased out is disheartening. The framework is in a sort of limbo stage where newcomers don't really know how to proceed. The lack of popularity (outside of some niches) doesn't help either.

I hate working with web frameworks but the network effect is real and not in favor of Qt. Perhaps there was a time when Qt was thriving and innovating, but right now it seems like it's just a bunch of fortune 500 companies paying 1-2 Qt developers to maintain legacy software.

Sometimes I wonder if there is an alternate universe where Qt won "the battle" and made the world a better place. Sadly for us, that didn't happen here.

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I believe "old school" Qt has a number of professional niches that wouldn't dream of using anything else. Certainly visual effects software is Qt heavy.

QWidgets are being phased out? What???

No, they are just mostly finished and aren't seeing a lot of new feature work being done ,if any. Qml is a way better way so that's what they are working on. It gets better every release, and that guy doesn't have a clue. Sorry. Just for the record, QML is awesome.

> they are just mostly finished

Yeah, I don't know how much experience you have with Qt but widgets are far from being "finished". There's plenty of things that could be improved if their focus wasn't on Qt Quick.

The use of Qt Widgets is declining (albeit slowly), as stated in http://blog.qt.io/blog/2019/01/14/qt-customer-survey-2018/. You're telling me that they're going to support two different technologies that do the same thing without giving preference to the newer, technically superior one?

Qt Quick is intended to replace Qt Widgets, but it isn't currently at a stage where that's feasible -- hence my apprehension.

Yeah, that's not true. They have said that Qt4 widgets are feature finished, and not being deprecated. Obviously eventually there will be little use of the older way, but they have repeatedly said they are not deprecating them. Believe what you want.

I'm aware that they aren't being deprecated, but that doesn't mean they aren't being phased out. When I say it is being "phased-out" I'm referring to how it will no longer be advertised as the optimal solution to a problem. Perhaps we're just arguing semantics at this point?

Phasing out is the same as sunsetting, i.e., terminating: https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/sunsetting

From the first post, I assumed the commenter meant something like, "in Qt 6 QWidgets will stop working", which is insane.

I guess it was poor wording on my part then, sorry. I only meant that it was not going to be the focus of the product anymore.

You can use the tool until it's deprecated. Everything is constantly being "phased out".

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