QT 5 Will Be Available For Raspberry Pi

New submitter sirjohn writes with the good news that "A small group of ICS and Nokia engineers have started working on a minimal bootstrap to bring fully functional Qt 5" to the Raspberry Pi, writing "Do you want to create the next big thing on embedded devices and have $35 to invest? You can now have a complete development environment with accelerated graphics for basically nothing. I think it's a big deal ..." Plus, Nokia is funding 400 of the boards and looking for ideas (and developers) to use them. The competition is stiff; there are already quite a few impressive ideas listed.

Comments

QT is fine

[Daniel Phillips]

I like QT. It has become my GUI toolkit of choice. It does a lot to help you write rich interfaces with sensible defaults. It is no mean feat to reconcile those two. Recent versions have an awful lot of shiny gizmos under the hood, a full featured animation framework for example. Very few complaints. Except the MOC. Approaches like sigc++ or Boost signals are much better than the half baked preprocessor hackery. Given that QT breaks compatibility badly with each major release anyway, how about putting less effort into justifying that entrenched silliness and think about moving into the 21st century?

Re:QT is fine

[Anonymous Coward]

Qt 5 is about a *minimal* break in compatibility between Qt 4[1], so your suggestion of "breaking compatibility badly" was rather poorly researched.

As for hating on moc... moc is not just for signals! I hear this sort of thing repeated time and time again, and it's clear that every time, people do not do their homework. When you can come up with a solution that can provide at least these capabilities, feel free to suggest it for Qt 6, and better still, offer a patch.

- qobject_cast, a dynamic_cast which works across module boundaries (and doesn't use RTTI)
- the meta object system, allowing you to introspect objects at runtime, think of something like C#'s reflection - take a look at things like QMetaObject[2] and QMetaMethod[3], etc.
    this includes runtime creation of instances of a given class, looking up a method by name and invoking it with random arguments, etc...
- the properties system (Q_PROPERTY), allowing things like QML to set properties on C++ objects from javascript
- signals and slots

[1]: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Qt5.pdf
[2]: http://doc.qt.nokia.com/latest/qmetaobject.html
[3]: http://doc.qt.nokia.com/latest/qmetamethod.html

Re:Definitely Exciting

[Anonymous Coward]

Why expect everyone else to do things for you?

Instead of whinging, why not make the effort and sign up for their mailing list and they'll email you when its out. (early/mid December is the bookies fav at the moment).

Re:Which area of the market?

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is Arduino's are fairly forgiving when you throw a funny voltage or analog input at them. the R-Pi has no analog, only 16 GPIO that is designed for short-distance communication on a board. In order to get decent IO you will have to buffer the GPIO in some way, and with this buffer comes the protection that the ATMEL's have already. It will be very easy to break a standard R-Pi without buffering the GPIO, plus compared to an Arduino, there is probably 10x as much code to do the same thing.

Just working with /sys/class/gpio is more work that your average Arduino program.

Re:Which area of the market?

[mrmeval]

http://www.cutedigi.com/product_info.php?products_id=4642&cPath=277#googlebase

$34.00
It has an AT91SAM7X512 Arduino shield compatible. I've not checked if anyone has added this to the Arduino IDE yet but you can always use .NET ;)

So the system will be called ...

[KWTm]

Wait, no one has mentioned this yet?

So, with the Raspberry Pi running the QT 5 operating system, of course this combination will be called ...

the QT Pi

Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week ...

How is this news?

[shish]

Surely any well written software should *already* run on the Pi? It's just a standard linux install, the only problem would be if your code was very hardware-specific, and I'm not sure why a GUI library would be...