This is the third and last installment of our series about full stack tracing. If you haven’t read them yet, you’ll probably want to check out the introduction and tool setup portions first. In this blog, we’re going to focus on visualizing and interpreting full stack traces. At this point, we’re going to assume that […]

Some time ago, I wrote about how to build C++ projects with ASAN on Windows. Now, if you happen to deal with Qt projects you may want to take this one step further and sanitize Qt itself. Why bother with a sanitized Qt build? Let's have a closer look on why having a sanitized Qt […]

Wait, there’s more? Yes, indeed. Qt Desktop Days delivered a lot of great content we’ve just got to share. VLC and Qt, a history If you need to play the widest variety of audio, video, or streaming formats on the planet, you probably know about VLC (the “cone player”). But did you know that VLC […]

KDAB has released KD Reports 1.9.0! KD Reports is a developer tool that generates printable and exportable reports from code and from XML descriptions. Reports may contain text paragraphs, tables, headlines, charts, headers and footers and more. Starting with this release, 1.9.0, KD Reports no longer supports Qt 4. However, KD Reports 1.8.2 and lower […]

KDAB has been working closely together with unu to create the dashboard application for their next-generation of electric scooters. You can find out about these affordable, innovative, urban transport solutions and book a test ride here. unu is now launching the scooters. So in this blog post, we will have a look at some of […]

If you’ve read the first article in this series, you’ll know what full stack tracing is and why you definitely want it. This time, we’ll show you how to setup full stack tracing on your Linux system. There are two steps – first get everything configured to capture a trace, and then view and interpret […]

We've just released version 1.8.2 of our developer tool, KD Reports. KD Reports generates printable and exportable reports from code and from XML descriptions. Reports may contain text paragraphs, tables, headlines, charts, headers and footers and more. Version 1.8.2 is planned to be the final release in the 1.8 series of KD Reports. KD Reports […]

Full stack tracing is a tool that should be part of every software engineer’s toolkit. It's the best way to investigate and solve certain classes of hard problems in optimization and debugging. Because of the power and capability it gives the developer, we’ll be writing a series of blogs about it: when to use it, […]

We are happy to let you know that the very first edition of Qt Desktop Days 2020 was a great success! Having pulled together the event at very short notice, we were delighted at the enthusiastic response from contributors and attendees alike. Over 500 registered attendees could enjoy five days of technical talks. The program […]

Memory bugs are tricky. Leaks have a clear impact on performance, and quickly become hard to spot when heap allocated objects move too much. Memory access bugs, on the other hand, make your program crash right away, if you're lucky. In less desirable cases, they may end up corrupting random objects on the heap, and […]

We have just released version 1.2.0 of Heaptrack, the fast heap memory profiler for C++/Linux applications. A bit of Background The Heaptrack fast heap memory profiler allows you to track all heap memory allocations at run-time. Afterwards, you can use the accompanying GUI tool to find optimization opportunities in your code by analyzing the recorded […]

Python is a handy all-purpose language. It can make you very productive within a short time period and has powerful expressiveness for data manipulation and processing. Yet, it's not a great fit for lots of tasks. C++ is far better at achieving anything that needs bare metal performance, deterministic timing, or low-level access. Thankfully, some […]

Today's blog post is about something that should be simple and apparently it causes trouble: how to declare a qHash overload for a custom datatype. This is necessary when we want to use custom datatypes as keys in a QHash. From the documentation: A QHash's key type has additional requirements other than being an assignable […]

After four months of intensive development work, I am happy to announce that the first QStringTokenizer commits have landed in what will eventually become Qt 6.0. The docs should show up, soon. While the version in Qt will be Qt 6-only, KDAB will release this tool for Qt 5 as part of its KDToolBox productivity […]

In the last blog post we saw an essential, C++ oriented, Visual Studio Code setup. That was enough to get going right away, but we can still definitely do more and better. Here I'll show you how to get a complete setup for your qmake and CMake projects, all this while also wearing a Qt […]

KDAB's Kevin Funk presented Using Modern CMake with Qt at Qt Virtual Tech Con last month. He reported that the Qt Company did a great job moderating the sessions at this event, and there was a lively Q&A at the end - Kevin had to pick from about 60 questions, so this is a hot […]

Qt has a long history. The first stable version was released before the first version of C++ was standardized and long before the different C++ compiler vendors started shipping usable implementations of the C++ standard library. Because of this, Qt often followed (and still follows) some design idioms that feel unnatural to the usual C++ […]

A few weeks ago, we published an article with an overview of Visual Studio Code through the eyes of a Qt developer. In this short blog series, I will show you how to get up to speed with a Qt project using Visual Studio Code more in detail. Before digging into the Qt parts, I'd […]

The upcoming version of the C++ Standard (C++2a) is proposing to deprecate certain usages of the volatile keyword, by adopting the P1152 proposal (Deprecating volatile). Despite the somewhat "flamboyant" title, the actual deprecated parts are very limited and indeed the paper limits the deprecation to somehow language/library corner cases and/or dangerous antipatterns. For instance certain […]

Working on color imagery for QiTissue recently, I realized we were accidentally losing the alpha channel in multiple places. For efficiency reasons, we keep colors in memory using the QRgb type, and convert that to/from QString for serialization purposes via QColor as needed. Here's what I discovered about why that doesn't work, and some ways […]