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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Would it help Google if they bought it as their own dev tool for Android? Something like Apple's own Xcode? Or are the incompatibilities too great to bother with it?

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Someone already ported Qt to android along with Qt Creator integration, all-in-one installer, and a Qt library packaging system for your apps. Appears to be in development still.

(edit) project page: http://sourceforge.net/p/necessitas/home/necessitas/

blog post: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/28/necessitas/

Unless there's some compelling reason to prefer Qt Creator over Eclipse, I'm guessing not.

On the other hand, the current Eclipse SDK does have a pretty compelling advantage over Qt Creator: it's already written and working. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

> working

From my personal experience, I'd have to say that's highly debatable.

> Or are the incompatibilities too great to bother with it?

Yes. Also Google already has multiple development platforms, including one for Android (two, if you count Java and C++ Android development separately, they do have separate development kits).

Qt could provide a GUI toolkit for C++ on Android.

Last I checked, native apps on Android were limited to raw OpenGL.

That would still require some sort of NDK backend for the Qt toolkit, since X11 is not compatible with the native Android windowing system. I'd imagine that's no small feat.

Well Qt doesn't require X11. Qt's backends are actually VERY flexible, essentially all you need to do is provide it with a 2D drawing surface in most cases.

There is already an Android port of Qt in progress here, with a lot of things (including Qt Quick and QWidgets) already working: http://sourceforge.net/p/necessitas/home/necessitas/ Several apps using Qt have already been published in Google Play.

Well Qt is simply a C++ API and as such can become a standard part of the Android NDK if Google chooses.

Since Google sees the NDK as something that is only intended for legacy code, games or performance hotspots, I doubt that.

What are some good examples of successful large framework mergers? I can't think of any off the bat. It all sounds good in theory until you try to look at it in practice. 2 different languages, 2 different ways of doing everything -- graphics, networking, logging, etc. I like Qt and I like Android API but not sure how they two can live side by side without stepping on each other's toes or detracting attention.

Rails and Merb?

I also hope Qt can get into Android. Qt is the best C++ api.

qt creator would be a great tool for developing google nacl(native client) applications rather than android I guess. I know there is already some work done for qt to work with nacl apis. http://qt-project.org/wiki/Qt_for_Google_Native_Client

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