Managing the timing and context of signals and slots in multithreaded applications, especially those with a GUI, can be a complex task. The concept of deferred connection evaluation offers a nice and easy API, allowing for controlled and efficient signal-slot connections. This approach is particularly useful when dealing with worker threads and GUI threads. A […]

If you work on C++ projects on Windows that need to be built with multiple Visual Studio C++ compiler versions, you need some way to manage the installations of all these build environments. Either you have multiple IDEs installed, or you know about build tools (https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vs_BuildTools.exe) and maybe keep only the latest full VS IDE […]

KDAB’s newest open-source library is now publicly available: KDSPDSetup! KDSPDSetup is a small library written in modern C++ (≥ 20) that initializes objects from the spdlog library by reading a toml configuration file. This makes setting up loggers more convenient and results in cleaner-looking code. Let's take a look at an example to see how […]

In the beginning, there was C. That sentence actually could serve as the introduction to a multitude of blog posts, all of which would come to the conclusion "legacy programming conventions are terrible, but realistically we can't throw everything out and start over from scratch". However, today we will merely be looking at two ways […]

We're pleased to announce the release of KDSoap version 2.2.0, an update that brings new enhancements to improve both the general build system and client-side functionality. What is KDSoap? KDSoap, a SOAP (“Simple Object Access Protocol“) component rooted in Qt, serves as an essential tool for both client-side and server-side operations. Tailored for C++ programmers […]

This article walks through an implementation using C++11 or later, Qt 6.5 or later for WebAssembly (multithreaded), and CMake. The browser environment used was Mozilla Firefox 119.0.1 (64-bit) provided by the Mozilla Firefox snap package for Ubuntu. Overview & Motivation Lately, I’ve been working on a small Qt Widgets project to help manage some weekly […]

For quite some time, I have been bothered by this thought: Individual programming languages (C++, Rust, Go, etc.) are traditionally viewed as walled gardens. If your main() function is written in C++, you had better find yourself C++ libraries like Qt to build the rest of your codebase with. Do you want to use Flutter […]

In a previous blog we demonstrated the most straightforward method to optimize Visual Studio Code for a Qt / C++ environment: simply let the tools do all the work! The example GitHub project we discussed automatically installs both the Microsoft C/C++ and clangd extensions into VS Code. You might wonder why you need both C++ […]

Our colleague Alessandro Ambrosano created a series of blogs (parts 1, 2, and 3) that explain how to get Visual Studio Code configured for Qt development. In that series, Alessandro covers all the details you need to get your VS Code environment configured exactly the way you want it. But there’s a lot there to […]

Today's blog post is about a small utility class in Qt with a... questionable name: QPointer. If you're new to Qt, maybe don't check out QPointer's documentation just yet, and try to guess what the class does based on its name alone. I've seen countless users being very confused by it. Some end up using […]

You may already be hosting your code on GitHub, but do you know that GitHub provides a built-in Continuous Integration solution called GitHub Actions that is very easy to set up and free for public repositories? In this article I'm providing a crash course on what GitHub Actions are and how to use it for […]

The time has come, fellow devs. We are on our way to uncover the newest concept of C++ language - Coroutines. They are already used by several programming languages, like C# async tasks and yield iterables, forming LINQ base; JS with awaitables, replacing the old way of making consecutive calls, that was hard to understand […]

When writing large graphics applications in Vulkan or OpenGL, there's many data structures that need to be passed from the CPU to the GPU and vice versa. There are subtle differences in alignment, padding and so on between C++ and GLSL to keep track of as well. I'm going to cover a tool I wrote […]

Reverse engineering in general is a tricky business and sometimes not very orthodox. So, why bother to write this article? Well, sometimes reverse engineering is also for something good. It started when my wife dusted off her watch. We had a huge unpleasant surprise when we found that the companion app is not available anymore […]

Last time we touched upon object lifetime and today we wrap up the basics with a bit of a spicy topic of object ownership. We covered the lifetime quirks, and we found out that manual memory management can be a nightmare, even if we new and delete in the correct order. There must be something […]

Last time we discussed Value Semantics. However, I missed one topic that is super important for a better understanding of basic building blocks of C++. Today, we are going to talk about an object. Without further ado, let’s dive deeper! Object What is an object? According to the C++ standard, part 3.9.8 under the name […]

C++ is an old language. Many aspects of our programming styles have become habits that we do not think about too much today. In this blog, I’m going to address one major issue that has resulted from such habits and get you prepared for a new bright world of C++2b. So without further ado, let’s […]

We are happy to announce the release of KDDockWidgets version 1.7.0! What is KDDockWidgets? KDDockWidgets is a development framework for custom-tailored docking systems in Qt, to use when you need advanced docking that is not supported by QDockWidgets. It was created by Sérgio Martins as a time-saving alternative to QDockWidgets. The ease-of-use of KDDockWidgets can […]

Background of Shaders One particular facet of modern graphics development that is often a pain - even for AAA games -- is shader variants! If you have bought an AAA game in recent years and wondered what the heck it is doing when it says it is compiling shaders for a long time (up to […]

The familiar solution for thick value classes that want to preserve binary compatibility is to use the pimpl pattern (private implementation), also known as d-pointer (pointer to data). In future versions of our class, we can freely change the contents of the pimpl (i.e. adding, removing, and/or modifying data members) but the binary compatibility of […]