Qt Creator API

Notes

• Who wants it? Quick check of hands at Qt WS did not show much interest
• History
  • 15 year ago, project inherited from Oslo ( Workbench / Greenhouse )
  • Was meant as replacement for Widget Designer as its started to become IDE’ish
  • Was supposed to be bound to one platform, one Qt version
  • Eclipse was “the” thing at the time.
    • Had problems with platform
  • Feature creep happened in Qt Creator
  • Social issues kept development compartmentalised
• Since then lots of work has happened to correct mistakes of the past and make Qt Creator be more flexible
• Bugs started to outpace development
  • “We need a stable api”
• Currently its ok’ish for people who know the internals, but the code is not really great for outsiders
• We were only able to get this far this quick because  we were able to break apis often/regularly, e.g. Remote File Access for Docker and SSH
• Process class is another example
• As long as there is only 2-3 new plugins a year the status is ok, but if more are coming this will not scale
• We have a lot of the components in place now that we need, e.g. TaskTree
• A lot of effort is currently put into cleaning up all the parts of Qt Creator
  • Removal of Boilerplate stuff
  • Builder patterns for recurring things like ActionBuilder
  • Aspects
    • Collections of things you need for Settings, e.g. Current value, old value, some widget, connections between widget and data, etc.
• Plugins still have to be compiled
  • Python POC was created 2019
  • Problems:
    • Language barrier has to be crossed
      • Mapping between C++ and python needs to be maintained
  • QtScript?
• Qt Creator is built against “some” publicly available Qt Version
• Qt Design Studio is just a set of plugins
• As long as we let people access all other plugins is basically impossible to provide a stable API
  • Provide a specific set of classes as API