The last post from my colleague Marc Mutz about deprecating Q_FOREACH caused quite an uproar amongst the Qt developers who follow this blog. I personally feel that this was caused fundamentally by a perceived threat: there is a cost associated to porting away a codebase from a well-known construct (Q_FOREACH) to a new and yet-undiscovered […]

In this article, I will take a look at one of the fundamental concepts introduced in Alex Stepanov and Paul McJones’ seminal book "Elements of Programming" (EoP for short) — that of a (Semi-)Regular Type and Partially-Formed State. Using these, I shall try to derive rules for C++ implementations of what are commonly called "value […]

Functional Safety is the term used for systems designed to minimize risk to human health. But there’s a dilemma in today’s tech-driven world. We are more reliant than ever on software to control our planes, trains, cars, and boats, to operate our medical equipment, to process our food, to clean our water, and to power […]

For today's blog I would like to share with you the little adventure I had when fixing a very strange bug in Qt. Pop quiz Don't think about this too much, just guess: what does this QML snippet print? There are no JavaScript semantic tricks involved; and using either == or === does not change […]

Are you a Qt developer and do you use Linux as your development platform of choice? Then this talk is for you: I will introduce you to perf, the Linux tool suite for performance analysis. The talk will not only cover a broad part of what perf has to offer, it will also dive into […]

A retrospective on the KDE community from 20 years ago and how things were done back then, with an emphasis on community spirit and fun facts. Over time, the KDE community has seen many people join and leave, as with any open source community, which means that very few people in the current community still […]

The past year was very important for the KDE PIM community. We released the first Qt5-based version, restructured our code base and set ourselves more ambitious goals. Let's look a bit deeper into some of the important changes that have happened in KDE PIM in the past year, and peak a little into the future. […]

Many KDAB engineers are part of the Qt Security Team. The purpose of this team is to get notified of security-related issues, and then decide the best course of action for the Qt project. Most of the time, this implies identifying the problem, creating and submitting a patch through the usual Qt contribution process, waiting […]

Design, Technical Excellence and Superb User Experience Why does a tipper truck need an app? Meiller is the leading manufacturer of tippers in Europe. KDAB software developers and UI/UX designers worked with Meiller to create a mobile app that interacts with embedded hardware on the truck, allowing drivers to diagnose and fix problems - even […]

Quick: When you design C++ APIs, when and how should you use pair and tuple? The answer is as simple as it is surprising: Never. Ever. When we design APIs, we naturally strive for qualities such as readability, ease-of-use, and discoverability. Some C++ types are enablers in this regard: std::optional, std::variant, std::string_view/gsl::string_span, and, of course, […]

Hello! This is a small wrap-up fromQtCon, the biggest Qt event in Europe in 2016, that happened at the beginning of September. At QtCon the Qt community joined forces with the KDE, FSFE and VideoLAN communities, to create an exciting event in the spirit of open collaboration and participation amongst projects. During QtCon many KDAB […]

Q_FOREACH (or the alternative form, foreach) will be deprecated soon, probably in Qt 5.9. Starting with Qt 5.7, you can use the QT_NO_FOREACH define to make sure that your code does not depend on Q_FOREACH. You may have wondered what all the fuss is about. Why is there a continuous stream of commits going to […]

Are you a victim of premature pessimisation? Here’s a short definition from Herb Sutter: Premature pessimization is when you write code that is slower than it needs to be, usually by asking for unnecessary extra work, when equivalently complex code would be faster and should just naturally flow out of your fingers. Despite how amazing […]

From time to time I scroll through Qt-related forums and mailing lists, and whenever possible I try to help fellow developers out. The other day a StackOverflow thread caught my attention: a developer was asking "What is the purpose of operator RestrictedBool in QScopedPointer?" Indeed, looking at QScopedPointer's implementation, one notices the strange RestrictedBool usage. […]

Is your code burning a lot of cycles hunting for strings? Maybe you need to find the proper charset nestled in a chunk of HTML, or look for the dimensions in an XPM image file, or locate the email attachment boundaries in a block of MIME. If you string search a lot and performance is […]

A novel solution to an old problem The QRegion class specifies a clip region for a painter. You can also query a QPaintEvent for the region() to limit the paint operations necessary in partial repaints. A region can be anything from a simple rectangle to a bitmap mask, but virtually all code that inspects a […]

Qt 5.6 has just been released! Packed with incredible new features, 5.6 is also the first long term support release of Qt: it will be supported for the next 3 years, giving developers a solid foundation for their current and upcoming projects. Once more, KDAB is confirmed to be the largest independent contributor to Qt, […]

What is GammaRay? For starters, it's a powerful electromagnetic wave, as well as a way to treat cancer. It’s also an under-appreciated German speed metal band. And it’s what gives Dr. Bruce Banner his big green alter ego. But Qt aficionados will know the GammaRay that we're talking about is an uber-powerful Qt debugger and […]