[haiku-development] Re: Haiku, Qt and apps, oh my!

  • From: Stephan Assmus <superstippi@xxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 28 Mar 2009 09:38:36 +0100

On 2009-03-28 at 08:53:28 [+0100], François Revol <revol@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Jason Todd Slack-Moehrle <mailinglists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >  ...
> > > 1. Since Qt (by Trolltech/Nokia) is now LGPL,
> > > what about a port of Qt to run on Haiku? I
> > > thought about this a while ago. Would it be
> > > beneficial? I could take on this task.
> >
> > I´d love to have more applications available,
> > even with some temporary inconsistencies.
> >
> > Perhaps I´m naive, but I think having Qt could
> > work as a catalyst or bridge, paradoxically
> > pulling Qt-based apps over to the Haiku API
> > faster, not having to port them completely.
> > Faster time to market.
> 
> If done correctly it could be almost as native as real stuff...

That's what I would hope. I agree with Ingo that Qt is a must have. We are 
slowly approaching real usability of Haiku. I am running it as my main OS 
now. It's doable because it runs stable enough and because we are close 
enough to the BeOS feature set. In some respects, we have surpassed BeOS. 
But that mostly means a state of things from 9 years ago. Some really, 
really important stuff like an IDE with integrated source level debugger, 
is just a big question mark. This is something where Qt can really help us 
(QtCreator). I would love to see Qt be a first class citizen on Haiku. Like 
the Interface Kit 2.0, but there is of course so much more included with 
Qt. It's just very complete. It even has the HTMLView based on WebKit...

> Besides, Qt is a rip off BeAPI, so it can't be that hard :)

Well, I wouldn't make such statements. It's just a sane API. But porting it 
should be doable for other reasons, like that the bulk of the framework 
will depend just on itself.

I think that Qt going LGPL is a sign that Nokia is pushing for maximum 
widespread adoption of the framework. It's just a very good framework and 
with really good integration (like direct coupling with app_server and so 
on), we should be able to make it run really well on Haiku, it probably 
isn't hard to make it run better than on Linux at least.

Best regards,
-Stephan

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