TrollTech Releases Qt 3.0

Dr. Sp0ng writes: "TrollTech released Qt 3.0 today. Among the new features are platform- and database-independent data-access features, data-aware GUI widgets, a much-updated Qt Designer, and much better internationalization and font handling features. It breaks binary compatibility but keeps almost complete source compatibility with Qt 2.x. The KDE team has already begun work on KDE 3.0, which will use the new toolkit."

Comments

Binary compatibility

[Starship Trooper]

While having open-source code makes source compatibility easier to handle than binary compatibility, I've been wondering if there has been any work towards improving binary compatibility between versions of major libraries. The glibc mess has made binary compatibility between distributions more and more difficult, and important libraries like Qt and the various KDE and GNOME libs regularly break binary compatibility. I realize a lot of this has to do with the C++ ABI; have the GCC people thought of any ways to make binary compatibility easier to maintain in C++ programs without requiring vtable hacks and other ugliness?

As Linux comes of age, this is an important issue. Major companies want to bring their software to Linux, but often give up when face with the nightmare of having to support the thousands of subtly different library interfaces. Working to maintain binary compatibility for new versions of software would be a good goal for Linux's advancement.

Re:Stallman's response

[RelliK]

Funny? I just can't tolerate trolls like that.