I'd like to share some thoughts regarding the Qt framework, which we used to develop our cross-platform application. It sports an amazing feature set: any features that have become standard in a grpahical user interface are easy to implement. For example, a slide-out drawer menu as seen in many mobile applications is an easy to add feature in Qt.
The Qt framework is written in C++, a flexible, efficient, and cross-platform
language. Thanks to the Android NDK C++ compiler and Apple's Clang C++ compiler, our Android and iOS apps benefit from easily integrated external libraries that provide advanced features. This includes the QR decoding library quirc, which I modified in order to use it to decode images captured using Qt's camera interface. excluded from the Qt framework some examples: quirc for Qr decoding and mbedtls for cryptographically secure communications
The biggest drawback to the Qt framework is its large size. Our Android users must download an 11MB APK file when they first install the application from the Google Play store. This size delays updates and slows down our development. It also increases the complexity of our final product, a detriment to any security evaluations or debugging sessions. Although I attempted to enable our compilers' dead-code elimination features, which would remove any unused components and therefore produce a much smaller installation file, this feature is impossible to perform automatically with today's technology. This is due to our use of the programming languages QML and Javascript, the compiler cannot easily prove that these dynamic languages will nevery require a given Qt feature. Therefore the installation file must include the entirety of the Qt framework.
C++ and QML are difficult languages with unfriendly syntax (compared to Python) and fragile type systems that cannot prevent as many errors as the more advanced and consistent type systems of other languages, such as Haskell, Coq, Ocaml, Rust, and Java. Unfortunately, our team had to deal with several runtime errors that could've been prevented by a more advanced language.
- Hugo
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