Qt Creator API

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Session Summary

Session Owners

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