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Comment by gregschlom | Hacker News Reader

There might be some confusion about Qt the runtime (ie: compiled binaries) and the Qt SDK for development. Last I remember (admitedly, >8 years ago) the Qt SDK certainly was a multigigabyte download.

In this case, you need the SDK to develop a UI with Qt, so I think the author's comparison is fair.

> Consider Qt Creator IDE which is quite minimalist, without Qt which it requires to run, requires over 200 MB Actual fact: 108.03 MiB

Probably depends on the platform, I wouldn't be surprised if it was > 200 MB on OS X. But either way, 100 vs 200, same order of magnitude

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> Probably depends on the platform, I wouldn't be surprised if it was > 200 MB on OS X. But either way, 100 vs 200, same order of magnitude

keep in mind that Qt Creator comes with a full clang for its C++ code model which is already 40-50 megabytes at least ; no decent C++ IDE can skip that.

Regarding the Qt SDK size, what can take gigabytes is installing it for all android & iOS ... ABIs / versions.

for a fast SDK installation experience, I recommend aqtinstall:

    $ pip install aqtinstall
    $ time python -m aqt install 5.15.0 linux desktop -O ~/Qt/
    10,43s user 2,14s system 153% cpu 8,213 total
    $ du -csh ~/Qt/5.15.0
    592M 5.15.0

(but really, just install e.g. qtbase5-dev on Debian systems has 99.9% of what is needed for most GUI desktop apps and is ~13 megabytes: https://packages.debian.org/sid/qtbase5-dev what takes space is 3D engines, webviews, multimedia apis, etc... but an awful amount of apps don't need those)

Yeah well, but that's because of the env. you chose to use, that qt5-base etc. I mentioned? it includes header files. Add your compiler of choice and you're good to go. I've no idea what "SDK" are you talking about, but honestly, I'm pretty sure that includes tons of documentation, images, multimedia, etc.

Last time I downloaded it some years ago, it was only a multi gigabyte download if you selected all of the optional packages and their sources, which, if I remember correctly, included multiple versions of Qt itself. Most of this stuff is not needed.

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