On 11/04/12 16:03, Thiago Macieira wrote: > On quarta-feira, 11 de abril de 2012 10.34.58, Rui Maciel wrote: > [...] >> Honestly, I expect Qt4 to be kept in use for a long time. And if push >> comes to shove, I suspect that some Qt4 users will be more keen to >> invest in a Qt4 fork or even ditching Qt in favour of some other toolkit >> instead of jumping on the Qt5 bandwagon. > > I understand that. Yes, I expect Qt 4 to be used for a long time too, but I > really, really hope that there is no push to come to shove. I really expect > that transitioning from Qt 4.8 to Qt 5.x be a matter of a few, easy search- > and-replaces and then a recompile. So I expect that the transition be > undertaken by most projects at the first opportunity, like when you'd upgrade > across minor versions of Qt.
Lots of people seem to think that porting from Qt 4 to 5 would require the same amount of refactoring work as the change from Qt 3 to 4. All I can say is "don't panic!" That is not true. The only "downside" with Qt 5 is that we can't switch to it, but rather will need to support it in parallel with Qt 4. Just as with the Qt 3/4 transition, the two versions will coexist for a few years, and if you want your apps to integrate well into people's desktops, you need to support both. But with Qt 3 vs 4, this wasn't really possible, or required too much work so most people decided to either stay with Qt 3 for a while or rewrite for Qt 4 and only do minor maintenance updates to their Qt 3-based versions. I don't think we will see this with Qt 5. Supporting both 4 and 5 with a few #ifdefs seems quite feasible. So this isn't why I "fear" Qt 5. What makes me uneasy is how Qt seems to slowly (but surely?) deprecate C++ for JavaScript. I believe all GUI code should be in C++. JavaScript, like all dynamic and weakly-typed languages, always looked to me as a language for lazy people who don't care about runtime errors and view the extremely helpful compile-time checks as an "annoyance." Qt was always a C++ toolkit, and now it seems it's slowly becoming a JavaScript toolkit instead. All would be OK if JavaScript was offered through bindings. But making it a native part, without a way to get to its functionality with pure C++ code; that just sucks and doesn't make sense. Common sense suggests JavaScript is a high-level interface to the low-level C++ parts. Qt decided to go against common sense here. And it kind of feels like we're being betrayed; after all these years sticking with Qt, it might turn its back on us, hanging out with its new homies, the mobile folks, because we're not cool enough anymore to hang around with. Anyway, I'm ranting too much since Qt 5 has not really deprecated C++. I just don't like the fact that I might need to put a "yet?" in the previous sentence. _______________________________________________ Interest mailing list Interest@qt-project.org http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/interest
