What to Expect From Qt 4

An anonymous reader writes "A presentation given by Matthias Ettrich (director of Qt development, author of LyX, and founder of the KDE project), was given to the annual KDE Developer's Conference in Nove Hardy, Czech Republic. In this presentation, Matthias details what's going to be new in Qt 4.0, which will be used as a base for the next version of KDE after 3.2. Apparently, Qt 4.0 will not only include faster startup times and lighter memory usage, but will have sweeping architectural changes, including a splitting of Qt's GUI classes and non-GUI classes."

Comments

Re:It Sounds Nice

[stratjakt]

Qt 4 mostly tries to preserve source-compatibility with a little search and replace and a COMPAT compilation switch. More porting will be required for styles and code that uses the meta object system directly.

Out with the old, in with the new.

Developers can adapt or fail. It doesnt seem wise to quit working towards better systems because some guy doesnt feel like replacing his widgets.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[Otter]

Developers can adapt or fail.

Remember, though, that we're talking about volunteer developers. If they fail, there's no one rushing in to take their customers. I remember when the KDE 3 plans were being made, there was a recognition that KDE's weakness is in the number and quality of apps and so there was a goal of keeping the APIs stable for as long as possible.

Now, greatly improved startup time would obviously be a huge reason to switch as soon as possible. Since pure Qt apps already start much faster than KDE apps, though, I wonder how much speed KDE would really gain.