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by soundarana 920 days ago
> Another thing you can immediately see is that the QML version of the algorithm is generally much slower than the JavaScript version. As noted above, this is due to it being built on QObjects rather than JavaScript objects.

Of course, QML is trying to beat the browser at it's own game, but can't match the billions invested in browser performance.

Qt classic is dead, and QML is a less featured, less documented, underperforming copy of Electron.

6 comments

Dead or not, I'm really glad Telegram and few other desktop apps still use QT and not the Electron shitsandwich.
Qt/qml is not an ideal, of course. There are many controversial things. But it outperform all of the alternatives in terms of portability, built-in features and performance in complex.
Qt Widgets is not dead, its feature complete and in many industries that's a very valuable. New projects in Qt widgets are being done all the time in the embedded space.
QML is not trying to beat the browser at its own game. It is not made to display, you know, websites (and web apps), with a stack that was originally created for documents, and that still shows. QML is not JavaScript, it's a neat UI description language that uses JS for dynamic aspects.

It's not less featured, it's differently featured: it has features that have been directly designed to create user interfaces. Unlike HTML and CSS!

The documentation is very good, actually. Of course, if you are already familiar with the web stack, it may seem obscure to you.

It is irrelevant what was the original purpose of HTML, what matters is what problems it can solve now.
It can do it, the way you can hammer a nail with a small axe. It's not exactly terrible, but you can tell that it wasn't made for it.
Sorry, but this is FUD. Qt is miles ahead of Electron in terms of performance, app startup, native platform support, and low memory consumption, to name a few.

Additionally, its documentation is one of the best in the market.

+1 on the documentation. As someone whose job involves a daily use of Qt, I think I've been spoiled by the documentation. Qt does a tremendous job of explaining nearly every function and property in detail, as well as giving a healthy class-level overview (often with code snippets and even screenshots where it might be useful). In fact, even their (many) example programs each have their own documentation page explaining what the example code ia doing.
not excatly on topic but is something is Tauri better than Electron (in terms of memory usage and disk footprint) ?
Short answer: yes. Tauri is using your OS own web view instead of shipping y’know… entire Chrome. And for native stuff, it’s generally faster and smaller with Rust than… checks notes… the entire Node runtime.

In short, it’s not super hard to beat electron especially in terms of disk/memory.

Now, that said. Many of you think you suffer because web=slow, JavaScript=bad yadda yadda. But this is often not true at all, which almost always turns up in apples-to-apples benchmarks. In fact, the suffering is almost always because of lazy/hypey/bloated stacks full of ads/multiple cloud backends for metrics, ads, logging, etc etc/poor coding standars etc etc. So the long answer is that Tauri won’t help with those deeper issues.

Disk footprint yes, since it uses the system's browser. Memory wise, probably not by much. It's still a browser.