Comment by ReactiveJelly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ReactiveJelly | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah. I'm giving up on it for these reasons:

- For CLI apps, Rust has a better event loop, better language, more libraries, and is easier to deploy

- QWidgets seems like it's not "cool" anymore, and I don't feel like learning QML. I liked QWidgets because it was mostly the same from Qt 4.0 through Qt 5.0.

- The commercial side has no financial interest in adding cool new features to the LGPL code

- So how long will volunteers keep fixing the LGPL side, when their work is funding a business that does not help them?

- I'm waiting to see how Copperspice (A Qt fork that cuts off support for older C++ versions and uses STL and UTF-8 aggressively) turns out

About 10 years ago, Qt was my _jam_. I did everything in Qt. Games, CLI, GUI, IRC bots. I think I tried to build a Qt web server a couple times. For a kid who hated Windows and web stuff, it was my gateway to event loops and modern programming concepts. I just quit loving it. It's still in use at work, but I'm making plans to back out of it. Oh well.

> - I'm waiting to see how Copperspice (A Qt fork that cuts off support for older C++ versions and uses STL and UTF-8 aggressively) turns out

Copperspice forked at the time of Qt 4.8 and has had since then a couple thousands commits from a dozen contributors - in the meantime Qt itself had literally tens of thousands of commits, bugfixes, new features, etc from hundreds of contributors

A lot of those commits are related to features some people might not care about. For example, I imagine a lot of work has been done on the JavaScript compiler for QML - but if only use QWidgets, that's irrelevant to me.

Actually I'm only talking about the qtbase repo (core, gui, widgets, network...) in the Qt case, while for copperspice since they forked before 5.0 it's still a monorepo and the commits encompass everything (eg same that for Qt, plus script, WebKit and a few others they kept).

> I'm waiting to see how Copperspice (A Qt fork that cuts off support for older C++ versions and uses STL and UTF-8 aggressively) turns out

It's been around for 7 years and is maintained by two people as opposed to a publicly traded corporation (Qt) with hundreds of employees. It has already turned out.

There is no alternative to Qt. It is the best in its class.

But you don't need it. You don't need Electron either. Just build a .NET application for Windows, a SwiftUI one for Mac, and a ncurses one for Linux. They can all share the same business logic code (if it has any), either via C ABI, IPC, or RPC. Your application will always be at the bleeding edge with the latest security patches and accessibility this way, as opposed to waiting for the next Qt/Electron release which is guaranteed to be later than the OS bugfix. Imagine if desktop OSes release, in addition to dark mode, a pink mode. Do you want your application to stand out as the ugly duckling?

> (..). and a ncurses one for Linux.

Nurses as an alternative to a QtWidgets GUI app? I'm not sure you're serious.

Most Linux users would prefer a well-designed curses application over a GUI. You don't have to ask me, just look at what Linux users actually run and share screenshots of. I'm talking about real Linux distro users not Chromebook users.

> Most Linux users would prefer a well-designed curses application over a GUI.

I've been using linux both professionally and for personal use for over a decade and, with the exception of working over ssh, the thought of using ncurses apps over good old GUI apps is so outlandish that it doesn't even register in the realm of possibility.

Your comment sounds like a meme of how linux users are detached from the real world with regards to usability.

The applications I write are mostly GUI code, so that would mean nearly 3 times the work.

"So how long will volunteers keep fixing the LGPL side, "

As far as I know, it's not 'indy devs' supporting the LPGL, rather the LPGL is merely a term of release of the regular, mainline branch. It's the 'same code'. Am I missing something?

For the core and majority of the library, yes, but some specific features (eg Charts) have been released as commercial-only.

Charts and several other modules are released both under GPLv3 licensing and commercial licensing. For Qt6 some of these modules have not been released yet, but should be available by 6.2, the first LTS.

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