[jart]

28kb? You're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. I just built Qt Hello World myself. It's about sixty megabytes in size.

    jart@debian:~/scratch/qtproject$ qmake -project
    jart@debian:~/scratch/qtproject$ make
    jart@debian:~/scratch/qtproject$ ldd ./qtproject | grep -Po '(?<==> )[^ ]*' | xargs ls -alH | awk '{x += $5} END {print x / (1024 * 1024.)}'
    59.5916

That's bigger than I expected to be honest.

[jcelerier]

Aren't you also listing all the non Qt libs here ? X11, libinput, pulse audio, dbus, gstreamer, OpenSSL... e.g. here on linux for a static build of Qt (which links against both X11 and wayland platform plug-ins, and uses an embedded libpng, harfbuzz, freetype, etc...) a QWidget hello world comes out at 14 megabytes.

[makapuf]

Id say its fair game if building hello world links those gstreamer and openssl.

[jcelerier]

> Id say its fair game if building hello world links those gstreamer and openssl.

why ? it entirely depends on how your linux distro chose to build Qt, not on Qt itself.

[EvilEy3]

Because application can't run without those libraries. It's like comparing Java application without taking JVM into account.

[jcelerier]

> It's like comparing Java application without taking JVM into account.

no, it's not. The "equivalent" of the JVM would be the libQt5{Core,Gui,Widgets...}.so ; but here we are talking about the operating-system-provided libraries, so it is like comparing with a Java application, with the JVM, and also for instance all the MS Windows system libraries, or all the macOS frameworks like CoreFoundation, etc etc.

[makapuf]

OK, so in this context the app is X MB. If all distros link those libs with libre cote and ui, for all intents and purposes, it takes X MB. If some dont, then lets discuss it (but if you can link to gstreamer and openssl to build a hello world, the issue is not entirely on the distro shoulders)