Both Facebook and Netflix implemented their eponymous apps with Web. Despite spending millions of dollars, neither of them could achieve an iPhone-like user experience (60 frames per second and less than 100ms response to user inputs) on anything less powerful than a system-on-chip (SoC) with four ARM Cortex-A9 cores.
In contrast, numerous products like infotainment systems, in-flight entertainment systems, harvester terminals and home appliances prove that you can achieve an iPhone-like user experience (UX) on single-core Cortex-A8 SoCs. Our above-mentioned manufacturer HAM Inc. (renamed for the sake of confidentiality) verified these results by building both a Web and Qt prototype.
In this white paper, Burkhard Stubert explains how he could save one of the world's largest home appliance manufacturers millions of Euros by choosing Qt over HTML. The secret? Qt scales down to lower-end hardware a lot better, without sacrificing user experience.
With a five times smaller footprint, four to eight times lower RAM requirements and a more efficient rendering flow than HTML, Qt provides faster start-up times and maintains the cherished 60fps and 100ms response time, where HTML would struggle. The calculations show that being able to just downgrade your SoC by just one tier like this, Qt can reduce your hardware costs by over 53%.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 22 2018, @10:54PM (20 children)
Native compiled application is faster than interpreted JavaScript application. News at 11.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @12:09AM (15 children)
This reminds me of when Mozilla found out that writing their OS backend in c++ "magically" made their performance and memory woes vanish with FirefoxOS.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @01:32AM (14 children)
I honestly thought you were joking, but looking through the information I can find, that claim seems true. I'm truly shocked at the level of surprise some of the developers communicated with the switch over. And their original plan was to basically have everything but the kernel and an init shim written in js.
(Score: 3, Touché) by driverless on Friday February 23 2018, @03:27AM (12 children)
I'm not. There really are people who think an interpreted scripting language can do everything, including running at the same speed as native code. And not just your canonical PHB, some programmers believe this crap as well. Having a high-visibility article written on this may help disabuse them of this insanity.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @09:13AM (2 children)
Back when Java bytecode was still interpreted (rather than JIT'ed), Java fans kept claiming that Java code could be *faster* than C code. Even though Java at the time was the slowest of all languages.
I tried arguing that if interpreted Java bytecode is faster than compiled C code, then write the Java runtime in Java, and show that it runs Java bytecode faster than the native Java runtime. Of course it would need to run on top of the native Java runtime, just like any other Java program.
Not only would that have to be faster if the claim is true, it would also mean that running the Java bytecode version of the Java runtime on top of itself is faster than running it on top of the native Java runtime. And as a consequence, you'd be able to keep stacking it on top of it self, making it faster every time, until you approach infinite speed.
Even that didn't convince them that there is no way an interpreted language is faster than a compiled one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @05:52PM
lmao!
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Friday February 23 2018, @07:40PM
But that's a straw man. Not even the silliest hard-boiled JVM advocates ever tried to claim that a 'pure' (non-JIT) interpreter could outperform traditional ahead-of-time compilation.
Thankfully, modern JVMs are not pure interpreters. They're far faster than pure interpreters... but, yes, they're reliably slower than highly optimised C code compiled with a serious C compiler.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by ptman on Friday February 23 2018, @09:53AM (4 children)
JIT compiled languages can be faster than C/C++ in some cases (Java has better memory allocator by default, the JIT compiler can optimize things based on what's going on when the program is run vs. what is predicted to happen when the program is compiled): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4516778/when-is-java-faster-than-c-or-when-is-jit-faster-then-precompiled [stackoverflow.com] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/110634/why-would-it-ever-be-possible-for-java-to-be-faster-than-c [stackexchange.com]
But generally compiled languages are preferred for performance critical tasks by default: https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/ [debian.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @11:57AM (1 child)
To the user the JIT compilation overhead when opening the program will still render it slower if it happens every time the program is opened. This slow down spread across many instances of usage (idiocracy such as writing CLI tools in Java that may be invoked millions of times per minute comes to mind) results in them wasting many more cycles than they would with a """slower""" precompiled binary. This is why .NET in windows is and always will remain garbage, despite it's per-system JIT compilation.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Friday February 23 2018, @06:44PM
This isn't inherent to Java, it's an issue with the way current JVMs typically work. There are two possible solutions:
1. Use Nailgun, [github.com] which essentially turns your command-line invocations into fast operations in an already-warm, long-lived JVM
2. Use a JVM with AOT compilation. Excelsior JET can already do this, and it may soon be coming to HotSpot.
.Net has a JIT cache, and fast start-up. .Net isn't like your average JVM - there's no mixed-mode execution with an interpreter.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Friday February 23 2018, @06:39PM (1 child)
Well, no. They're different. The JVM can do ultra-fast pointer-bump allocations, but it has to do garbage-collection. C/C++ have slower allocation and manual deallocation, but they don't have to run a garbage collector.
(Score: 1) by ptman on Monday February 26 2018, @02:22PM
True, only better in some cases.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday February 23 2018, @07:19PM (3 children)
That's not wrong though, with the magic of JIT. For example CL/SBCL is an "interpreted scripting" language that runs very close to C and in some cases faster.
It's just that much less work goes into developing JITs for interpreted languages than compiled languages.
(Just a reminder that language != implementation. I can damn well make Python run as fast as C if I write a good enough compiler for it.)
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Friday February 23 2018, @09:00PM (2 children)
No, this is absolutely not the case. For a start, there's no such thing as an 'interpreted language', but the differences between programming languages really do have consequences for their performance, and it's silly to pretend otherwise.
A vast amount of effort has recently been expended on accelerating dynamically typed languages, particularly (but not exclusively) JavaScript. It's still far, far slower than C/C++, and will continue to be. [debian.org]
Even if you use a C compiler that doesn't optimise well, like Tiny C Compiler, your C code will likely outperform JavaScript on V8. Why? Solid technical reasons - it's far harder to optimise dynamically-typed languages.
You can't. If you could, I'd be asking why on Earth you haven't published your techniques.
Google tried and failed. [wikipedia.org] Various people [google.com] have done PhDs on this kind of challenge. Dynamically typed languages remain far slower than C.
There's even a name for this fallacy: the Sufficiently Smart Compiler fallacy. [c2.com]
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Sunday February 25 2018, @07:18AM (1 child)
Google was building a just-in-time compiler. If you built a regular ahead-of-time compiler that took a Python script as an input and spit out a binary there's really no reason it couldn't be as fast as something written in C. In the same way a human could also take the same script, and understanding how it worked, rewrite it in C and fed the resulting code to a regular C compiler. Hey - I didn't say it would be easy.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Sunday February 25 2018, @07:45PM
No. Language design does impact code performance. You really think Google were so stupid as to overlook the ahead-of-time option, before wasting thousands of hours?
There are differences between JIT and static compilation, but they're not generally total game-changers, and in this case, JIT might actually be a better strategy.
JIT compilers have the advantage of runtime information (regarding both program execution, and precise knowledge of the target architecture), but have the disadvantage that they can be more constrained in terms of how long they should execute for.
Also, an ahead-of-time compiler is a JIT compiler... if you happen to run it immediately before executing its output.
No. Efficiently handling dynamic typing is incredibly challenging. In C, the compiler knows precisely what is meant by the '+' operator, and which function is referred to by an identifier. (Well, ignoring its link model, at least.) This is because of C's static typing and simple dispatch rules. In Python, you know almost nothing at compile-time, so unless your compiler is very smart at handling these uncertainties, your generated code will handle this stuff at runtime, and performance will be disastrous. This, in brief, is why it's much harder to compile Python/Ruby/JavaScript to efficient machine code, than to compile the equivalent well-written C code.
If you want to read about how projects like JRuby speed up their interpretation, a good starting point might be this blog post. [headius.com] They have to put in a lot of work if they want to compete with static languages in terms of performance.
Yes, it's theoretically possible (in complexity theoretic terms), and perhaps compiler technology will get there eventually, but dynamically typed languages will remain slower for the foreseeable future.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @04:09PM
There is a generation of "programmers" running around these days that have never touched anything but interpreted languages.
You will notice this in how they have no respect for memory footprints or cpu utilization, only "UX" and features (and maybe "security" theater when pushed).
(Score: 2) by Lester on Friday February 23 2018, @11:38AM (3 children)
But multiplataform development is easier with Javascript than with any compiled language.
(Score: 2) by pendorbound on Friday February 23 2018, @02:11PM (1 child)
Qt is actually pretty easy to work in. Try it before you knock it. It's a bit more complicated to write, but you miss a lot of the "write once, debug forever/everywhere" issue that Java & Javascript give you. It's a net gain from a development time perspective. The runtimes are a lot more consistent across platforms than web browsers are.
More importantly though, this article isn't even talking about multi-platform. The Qt example is talking about writing an app to target a specific piece of hardware. You need to pay for higher specs to run the same app more slowly when you write it in HTML/Javascript compared to a native GUI system.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Friday February 23 2018, @06:52PM
Lester does have a point though - it's a very different skill-set. If I had a team of passable web-devs accustomed to writing passable JavaScript, and with no knowledge or understanding of C/C++, I wouldn't want them set loose.
Maybe QtQuick would help there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @03:44PM
JS isn't even consistent between browsers and the "standard" changes on a daily basis. Please try again.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Sulla on Thursday February 22 2018, @10:57PM
I don't know what they are talking about but I would prefer my international harvester not get a cracked screen whenever it hits a rock and prefer my refrigerator not be battery operated but with "the freedom to charge anywhere".
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 4, Interesting) by NewNic on Thursday February 22 2018, @10:58PM (13 children)
I thought that the point of Soylentnews was to get away from the bad stuff on the Green Site.
This is just an ad disguised as a white paper. It should not have been accepted.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:33PM (8 children)
Idk who modded the above troll, but its absolutely correct. Qt makes money selling commercial licenses and support. TFA is an advertisement.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Friday February 23 2018, @04:00AM (5 children)
Drug companies make money from selling drugs, and biotech companies make money from 3D-printed, or petri-dish-grown, body parts, so there should be no health-related stories?
Believe it or not, the world is commercial, it's not some hippy commune or punk squaat, and therefore most stories will involve a commercial entity. Do you want to ban them all?
If not, it seems what you object to is anything being painted in a positive light, and all you want is hate stories. I wonder what Freud would say...
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by snmygos on Friday February 23 2018, @06:58AM (1 child)
Maybe if they have compared the development time (JS vs C++) and debugging, it would be less favorable to Qt? Or the price of the license, etc...
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday February 23 2018, @10:14AM
Cost of the license was considered.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @09:20AM (2 children)
Space-X doesn't sell to us, to us they are just cool stuff.
Health-related stories are usually either negative or so far in the future that it can't be considered advertising anyway.
The Tesla stories, though, might be taken as advertising by some.
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Friday February 23 2018, @09:51AM (1 child)
Brand awareness is a real advertisement strategy, and quite deplorable at that. Basically, they are trying to cramp their company/product name in everyone's heads by repeatedly putting their brand in your face everywhere you go. It is nothing short of deliberate attempts at brainwashing the public by exploiting the shared flaws of human cognition.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @12:00PM
If their product is actually better who cares?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @09:13AM
So what are good equivalents of Qt for stated purpose? Java?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @05:54PM
ads for FOSS don't count. only slaveware should be banned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @01:03AM
I thought that the point of Soylentnews was to give Slashdot rejects a place to go.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by janrinok on Friday February 23 2018, @05:25AM
I edited and released this story. I am also a programmer who dabbles in IoT and enjoys building and programming all sorts of things. There is plenty of interest in this story for people such as myself. Whether you want to criticise comparing size footprint, memory usage or running speed of html when compared with a modern toolkit, or whether you are deciding what to make next and how to write/structure the code, there is something to note.
Not every story will appeal to every member of our community. Please feel free to skip the stories that don't press the right buttons for you. Better still, why not submit a few stories of things that do interest you and we will try to get them onto the front page? But, from my point of you, the story has already been a success - you have been moved to submit a comment and it is the comments that make this site different.
JR
(Score: 5, Informative) by maxwell demon on Friday February 23 2018, @07:03AM
The bad stuff at the green site we wanted to get away from is summarized as "Beta". In particular, it had nothing to do with the quality of the stories, and everything with the user interface and the fact that those operating the site didn't listen to their users.
That doesn't mean we don't prefer good stories to bad stories, and if the average SN story is better than the average /. story then this is a good thing and something to strive for, but it is not the reason of this site's existence.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Friday February 23 2018, @06:55PM
From the top of the paper:
People were paying to learn to use a framework that didn't exist?
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:02PM (6 children)
What does this even mean? Is the footprint 20% of HTMLs? Then why not, for the sake of the math deprived, just say "1 fifth the size of the HTML app". Cuz all Americans know what a fifth is....
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Snow on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:25PM (3 children)
Exactly. So if the html is 10kb, then this would be ( 5 * 10 = 50 ) 50kb smaller than that.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:35PM (2 children)
No, dats dere dat Newfie math youse doing dere buddy!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @02:41AM (1 child)
I take it you haven't heard of Common Core then, eh?
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday February 23 2018, @02:48AM
Isn't that where the politicos realize the common core is 70% of the population (albeit with 10% of the wealth) and decide to raise taxes on them, cuz fairness and spread the pain?
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @02:09AM
Yup! 750ml of distilled good times (and for about half of those who drink it, time for a fight or to beat one's wife/girlfriend). Booyah!
USA! USA! USA!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Friday February 23 2018, @04:14AM
In the context of "times", smallness is the reciprocal if largeness.
If you view smallness as the negative of largeness, in a "times" context, then you'll get silly results.
Those who use "N times less", however, should be forcefully voltage-cured, as they've mixed the multiplicative "times" with the additive (inverse) "less". Ambiguity ensues.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Informative) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:05PM (6 children)
HTML5: highly inefficient broken client-server display model wannabe based on a heavily modified stateless document viewing standard.
Qt5: native application framework, designed to be, well, a framework from the ground up
Apples, oranges...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by requerdanos on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:19PM
What kind of comparison? Apparently:
For some applications, apples are the best fruit. For other applications, oranges do a better job. Those using fruit for their applications need to compare them, cliché or no cliché.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 23 2018, @02:23AM (4 children)
The real problem is that lots of "decision makers" still don't have a clue.
Back in 1999 I had to explain to our CEO, repeatedly, why Java was not going to be an acceptable replacement for our C++ software. If he were still in a decision making capacity, he'd probably have to have the HTML vs Qt/C++ thing explained to him every couple of weeks, too.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday February 23 2018, @03:29AM (3 children)
Had similar problems: "Lets replace our native code using a compact binary data format with Java and XML, because it's much trendier". Twelve months later: "Why does it take the app nine minutes to start up? Our old native app only took a few seconds". Well no shit Sherlock, you've got exactly what you were asking for when you made the switch.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 23 2018, @12:55PM (2 children)
This guy bought into the "code once, run anywhere" Java BS (which Qt partially delivered on many years later). It's a powerful argument, and if your app doesn't have any performance needs, then fine - run an interpreter, etc. etc. But, our users were already waiting 30 seconds for the data to crunch, and making that time longer would not have been a good thing. The Java promise was that the world would build native Java processors, speed doubles every 2 years, etc. but that never really happened for Java - even "code once, run anywhere" didn't really pan out as well as one would have hoped.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday February 24 2018, @02:16AM (1 child)
The really crazy thing about this is that while the initial argument was "code once, run anywhere", what they ended up with was "code once, run on Windows 7 or 8". I don't think that stuff has ever been run on anything else (well, used to run on XP and Vista when it was supported).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 24 2018, @03:44AM
I've run Java on Linux and OS-X, but only with great pain - special attention to environment details, etc. Some of my least favorite technologies are the "Java based" cross platform ones: red5 media server and Mirth Connect are the two most recent, but it seems like every couple of years I encounter some giant steaming pile of Java that it's easier to just use for whatever thing it is I need to do quickly, but if I had to live with it as a customer facing (stable) solution, it would just about have to be recoded in something else.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Subsentient on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:05PM (5 children)
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:35PM (3 children)
GTK+3/4 is probably more comparable to HTML5 than QT5 based on personal experience, especially if you are running it on 2d unaccelerated graphics hardware.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @01:56AM (2 children)
Why do so many guys who seem to have some knowledge of this toolkit capitalize the t in Qt?
N.B. QT (QuickTime) is a mostly-obsolete Apple multimedia framework.
This makes me think of the people who say "X Windows".
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @02:21AM (1 child)
It's probably because they pronounce it "Cue Tee", rather than the official "cute" (though either is acceptable, even within the Qt company).
Though if they wanted it pronounced "cute", it should be spelled "Q-'t". I would expect "Qt" to be more like "kt", since a "q" not followed by a "u" is typically pronounced like a "k", such as in the country "Qatar".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @02:36AM
This effect has been studied extensively [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @04:19PM
Apparently it is an even bigger bitch to work with than C++ based Qt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0 [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:37PM (5 children)
TL:DR;
Qt is from a company selling software and services for profit. Thus it naturally follows that all his arguments are invalid and not even worth considering.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by inertnet on Friday February 23 2018, @12:50AM (4 children)
Kind of ironic is that Qt was originally created by Nokia, which lost the smartphone race while creating Qt.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @01:42AM
Not accurate.
Nokia took ownership in the late noughts.
It was created by Trolltech. [wikipedia.org]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by pipedwho on Friday February 23 2018, @01:45AM (2 children)
Qt was originally created by Trolltech in 1995, and KDE started up about a year later. Then 13 years later in 2008 Nokia bought Trolltech, and started contributing to the project.
No, Nokia didn't create Qt, but yes, they did 'lose' the smartphone race. There move towards Qt was too little, too late. And it still wasn't anywhere near as open, portable and usable by third parties as Android.
Qt development never ceased, and it has always been a usable open source library for developing GUI applications.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Friday February 23 2018, @04:29AM (1 child)
http://www.ubergizmo.com/2012/09/nokia-rm-581-columbus-harmattan-prototype-leaked/
Nokia couldn't decide what platform/toolkit Harmattan should be based on, and changed their minds several times. Hilarity, like the eventual loss of thousands of jobs, ensued.
And Elop was Microsoft's Trojan Horse.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pipedwho on Friday February 23 2018, @05:48AM
It was sad to watch while Nokia screwed up with Symbian, and then tried to go the open source route with Qt, but were floundering so badly in the wind that they finally hit the proverbial ice-berg when they struck the deal with Microsoft to use Windows Phone. Then Microsoft bought them out, which was monumentally stupid, and we know where that led. The iPhone (or equivalent) should have been a Nokia product. It was their market to lose. It seems they just got too big and didn't have a strong enough captain to steer the ship where it needed to go.
It kind of reminded me with IBM and OS/2. They could see Microsoft doing all sorts of things to gain market share, yet, there they were charging ridiculous prices for an OS that needed work and needed apps. IMO, if IBM kept with the program, fixed some underlying design issues, and engaged much stronger marketing strategies, they might have staved off the MS Windows monoculture. There was already impetus from businesses to move towards OS/2, and they just needed to get Word Perfect and Lotus 123 ported to their platform and they would have owned it. But, no, they sat back and did jack shit (but what else do you expect from IBM) and instead developed Lotus Notes (the biggest POS software that ever was written), made that half arsed Lotus Smartsuite, and overpriced everything they made. Meanwhile, Microsoft is massively benefitting for everyone rampantly pirating their shit, benefitting from their predatory practices of making DOS and Windows (in)compatible with externally competing popular software, and of course the shady deals with manufacturers to exclusively pre-install DOS/Windows. So, in short, I blame IBM for Microsoft's eventual market dominance.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:43PM (2 children)
Am I the only one that doesn't think of most IoT projects as having a screen?
QT vs HTML5 is a rendering issue, not typically a IoT device workload.
(Though the thought of running a browser on a headless sensor pack to get access to said sensors through some HTML5 sensor API, is so ridiculous and horrid somebody's probably doing it.)
(Score: 4, Funny) by MostCynical on Friday February 23 2018, @12:03AM
Where is the +1 horrified mod? Add a modem and central server for "authentication" or "security" and make the in-built browser run the central server application.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @01:19AM
Although Qt is billed as a graphical framework, it is quite robust and can be used for things not related to GUI-interaction at all. I particularly like using their signal system in multithreaded servers, makes things a little easier than handling a bunch of callbacks.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:50PM (1 child)
I just want to view the damned thing. The first link wants to boil the frog asking me a question at a time without suggesting how many questions I might have to answer. The second forces a download rather than click and view, what the hell? If I wanted to download, I would have right clicked.
(Score: 3, Funny) by FatPhil on Friday February 23 2018, @04:33AM
That's the point of the story.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Informative) by Rich on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:50PM (3 children)
And if they'd go with the classic Qt Widget set, they'd efficiency-wise gain another order of magnitude over this newfangled QML stuff that only seems to be there to market to those mentally locked into the web world.
Anyway, classic fanboy topic from 10 years ago.
From my own experience, Qt is neat. I once did a fluid simulation design app (graph with pipes, valves, pressure sources and sinks) for a customer. Not pretty, but full desktop app, complete mousing interaction, undo, in Qt, in a couple of weeks. On my "main" Mac, because that was, what I was I had easily at hand. Deployment at the customer on a Linux production machine, no hassle whatsoever. And one day their development guys called and said they just built it on Windows, so it would run on their office workstations. Definitely the right choice for such a thing.
For embedded, it may help that they kept a bit of NIH culture and avoided the bloaty mess between STL, boost, libstdc++, and whatever other libraries one has to pull in.
Astoundingly, although it works well, the actual Qt source is (at least in once place I sampeld) not very pretty. I once had to debug into one function, and once I saw the source, I was like "Ugh. Behind all the clean top-level architecture and the neat documentation, there's that ugly stuff???". But that was long ago and I never had to dive in again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @09:49AM (2 children)
I love Qt, but why would you expect it to look good under the hood?
It makes you use macros! In C++!
(or am I out of date?)
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday February 23 2018, @10:17AM
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Friday February 23 2018, @07:33PM
Does 'moc' preprocessed C++ strike you as that ugly? The bar is set pretty high these days. The webby way is to pull in literally megabytes of JavaScript and base your whole front-end around the flavour-of-the-month framework.
Use of a preprocessor doesn't strike me as that bad. An additional PITA for the build system, sure (they're still all awful, as far as I know), and it's a good reason to avoid Qt when teaching standard C++, but moc isn't so bad.
Also, moc isn't exactly macros. If if were just a matter of C++ macros, there'd be no need for moc in the first place.
Also, compared to its C++ rivals, Qt's design is remarkably nice. If moc is the price, it seems worth it.
(Score: 3, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:56PM (1 child)
Since when was "Web" a noun in this sense?
PS There's really not much point linking to the "story" when you've included the entire text in the summary.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @12:06AM
WEB of course is the language in which TeX is written, designed by Donald Knuth... basically a literate programming version of pascal.
I had no idea Netflix and Facebook used it, cool!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @01:06AM (7 children)
Which is faster, more portable and cheaper to develop? Which users give a fuck about response time down to the microseconds if the app is useful and non-trivial?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pipedwho on Friday February 23 2018, @01:53AM (5 children)
The enormous proliferation of high latency UIs these days shits me to tears. You can't even go to an ATM and expect to enter your PIN without the UI lagging so badly that makes you wish you went with 4 digits instead of 12.
Back in the day CD players had pretty much 'instant on'. You hit the button, and some unnoticeable time later music was playing. The came along DVD players, you hit the button, waited a few seconds, and your CD (yes music on a DVD player) or started playing. Now we have Bluray players, where you hit the button, go get a cup of coffee while the OS boots, and finally, the music starts playing.
Latency is growing more and more as time goes on, and people don't seem to care.
It makes me sad.
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Friday February 23 2018, @08:33AM
Back in the day CD players had pretty much 'instant on'.
CD players do not have Intel processors and Microsoft software. There is no need for lag.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @10:41AM
Yeah, it was even better back in the day, with those instant on tube radios...
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Friday February 23 2018, @05:38PM
All Blu Ray players implement Java.
Yes. Really.
I'm not even kidding.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Friday February 23 2018, @11:00PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Sunday February 25 2018, @07:34AM
The same thing with computers. I've got a couple of old Windows 2000 and XP machines kicking about for various things. I don't use them very often, but when I do one of things I always notice is just how snappy and responsive the UI is compared to the more recent versions of Windows. Granted, these machines are kind of high end by 2000/XP standards, but are pretty dated by today's standards.
Of course, on the Linux side XFCE is also very snappy and responsive, though still doesn't seem quite as fast as it used to be.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Friday February 23 2018, @04:46AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday February 23 2018, @01:31AM (11 children)
That headline's like asking if you'd prefer to be kicked in the left testicle or the right.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by fyngyrz on Friday February 23 2018, @01:38AM
Speaking as a pretty in-depth QT developer - hundreds of thousands of lines of c++ / QT class based code - I enthusiastically second your opinion.
Also, once they move on and leave your version of QT unsupported, you get to be kicked in both. For no good reason at all except "drool, new, shiny" on the part of the QT devs themselves. Idiots.
QT's cross-platform capability is great - until you run into bugs, and/or until they leave you behind. Then things get... interesting.
(Score: 4, Funny) by driverless on Friday February 23 2018, @03:32AM
Kick away, we're a Unix shop here.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday February 23 2018, @04:47AM (3 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday February 23 2018, @06:07AM (2 children)
The left. It's the sinister one. After time to think it over though, I'd almost always rather get kicked in the crotch than do any sort of GUI coding beyond what I do on the site here; the pain doesn't last nearly as long. Give me a nice, simple shared library, a CLI utility, or even something running on some microcontroller's bare metal any day of the week.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Touché) by chromas on Friday February 23 2018, @08:16AM (1 child)
Won't kicking that testicle make it the regressive left?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @03:49PM
Is that why y'all conservatives are always so ornery? Your right testicles have been caved in? Might explain the obsession with "vucking" as your nuts can't fire live rounds?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday February 23 2018, @07:22PM (3 children)
Which free software GUI framework that does not involve testicular assault would you prefer to these two?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 24 2018, @12:16AM (2 children)
I wouldn't. I'm smart enough to not try running idiotic GUI bullshit on a microcontroller.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday March 14 2018, @04:01PM (1 child)
Even if the configuration GUI runs on a device-that-is-not-a-microcontroller and sends the finished configuration to the microcontroller, you still need a framework for the configuration GUI that runs on a device-that-is-not-a-microcontroller, whether said device-that-is-not-a-microcontroller runs Windows 7, Windows 10 in S mode, GNU/Linux, Android, macOS, or iOS. Which GUI framework for an app that runs on a device-that-is-not-a-microcontroller is preferred?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 14 2018, @04:43PM
In that specific instance? HTML. Either internet or local network accessible depending on your specific needs but it makes zero sense to allow multiple devices to have configuration change permissions when it can be done more easily and securely from a centralized source. Ideally the devices to be configured wouldn't even accept incoming traffic at all but would instead poll a server at regular intervals; admittedly this is not always viable.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Friday February 23 2018, @07:45PM
Well, one is ugly, hairy and bloated, and the other is surprisingly elegant.
(Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Friday February 23 2018, @09:41AM
I self-identify as Cat-kin.
It's 120 FPS or bust!