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Comment by kombine | Hacker News Reader

From their manifesto:

> Long ago there was an OpenSource library called Qt. When it was C++ and Widgets, it was great. Then the library lost its way and became focused on phones. It also became dramatically less "open" and much more "you have to buy a license." The C++ Widgets side of the library withered as resources were poured into a non-typesafe worthless thing called QML. This was well after making a play for the medical device market. You can't use non-typesafe junk when lives are on the line.

Their writing style is a serious turn-off.

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If being non-typesafe is a turn-off they should not be using C++. They should be using Go, Rust, or some other memory-safe language with better type safety.

The latest crazy Windows IP stack RCE pushed me wholly over into the "nothing new should be written in C/C++" camp. It's clear that secure reliable software can't be done in these languages, at least at scale.

The macho counter-argument of "but I can do it!" doesn't work. Maybe you can. It doesn't matter. Code will be worked on by more people than just you if it lives for a long time. Code "rots" and acquires bugs, and having the compiler catch the worst ones (memory errors, type errors) is a huge win.

If only there was an existing gui library as mature at Qt4 written in these languages, so they could fork it.

There are some good Go and Rust UI frameworks they could contribute to, but that would mean contributing to a common goal rather than forking endlessly.

even safer languages like rust still do not prevent against many problems, such as: logic errors, stack overflows, out of memory errors, bitflips, memory leaks, unrecoverable errors (panic's), memory safety related issues in an unsafe context

It's like saying seat belts, air bags, and crumple zones do not prevent all automobile deaths. They don't, but they help a whole lot. Prevention of all bugs converges with artificial superintelligence and/or solving the halting problem (which is impossible).

There are formal languages that do more than Rust, but they're a lot less practical. Working on making a more practical one would be a useful exercise.

You can forbid unsafe at the Cargo.toml level in Rust. You can also just search a project for the keyword "unsafe" to subject all unsafe code to extra levels of scrutiny. Some orgs set commit rules where commits containing "unsafe" must be approved by more people or must pass through a security audit team.

That's not quite true. Stronger type systems such as in Rust, OCaml and Haskell do help prevent logic errors. Also Rust can provide very precise control over memory allocation so that can help with OOMs.

No language that I'm aware of protects against bit flips or claims to have memory safety in its memory unsafe escape hatches (kind of the point).

Honestly, what is your point?

Agreed. And I don't understand why people keep thinking Qt is not 90% LGPL.

Qt Company tries to hide that as much as they can.

What parts are closed off?

For the people that Qt doesn't work it, it may as well be 100% proprietary; (L)GPL does not play well with super-duper-proprietary hardware. That's not a bug, it's (L)GPL doing what it was designed to do. These companies just aren't fans of providing their customers the code to the applications they sell.

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