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 […]

What is Akademy? Akademy is the yearly conference for the KDE community, which is a community devoted to creating free software for desktop and mobile. Typically, Akademy takes place in a different city each year. However, due to the pandemic, the conference was online this time around. September 4-11 marked the dates of Akademy 2020. […]

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 […]

We are pleased to announce a new release of our Hotspot Linux perf performance analysis GUI, Hotspot version 1.3.0! Hotspot is a replacement for perf reportthat takes a perf.data file, parses and evaluates its contents, and then displays the result in a graphical form. You can read a bit more about Hotspot here. Overview of […]

Up until now, Qt 3D was relying on OpenGL for rendering. With the upcoming Qt 6, Qt will come with a rendering abstraction layer (Rendering Hardware Interface or RHI) to target not only OpenGL but also Vulkan, Metal and DirectX. We are in the process of adding RHI support to Qt 3D. This will allow […]

Today, KDAB is releasing version 1.2 of the 3D integration workflow Kuesa 3D, built on top of Qt 3D. Kuesa™ 3D is a complete design-to-code workflow solution for 3D in real-time applications, centered around the open glTF™ 2 format, supported by Blender, Maya and 3ds Max. In short, Kuesa provides a workflow that simplifies work […]

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 […]

Qt 3D, being a retained mode high level graphic API abstraction, tries to hide most of the details involved in rendering the data provided by applications. It makes a lot of decisions and operations in the background in order to get pixels on the screen. But, because Qt 3D also has very rich API, developers […]

We have released version 2.11.1 of our Qt application introspection tool GammaRay. The changes mainly focus on establishing full compatibility with Qt 5.14 as well as bugfixes and performance improvements, but there's also a few new features. Areas most affected by changes in Qt 5.14 are the inspection of Qt Quick software rendering, deployment on […]

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 […]

KD SOAP is a tool for creating client applications for web services. The release of 1.9.0 brings a fair number of improvements and fixes, as the following text describes. General C++11 is now required. Qt4 is still supported, but this is the last release with support for Qt4. rpath for Unix/Linux/macOS (#181) is now fixed. […]

Did you miss the past Qt World Summit? Were you there, but you couldn't attend that talk or two that you really wanted to see because the conference was so, so packed with awesome content? Fear no more! We are glad to announce that the talks at the past Qt World Summit 2019 in Berlin […]

Have you ever noticed code highlighting disappearing in Qt Creator for some projects, without any apparent reason? Can't get Ctrl+Click to work on any class name or function name anymore? Maybe you have ignored it at first, got used to it, and decided it's just one of those things that just "happen sometimes"; or maybe […]

Continuing our blog series about KDToolBox, this time we will discuss UiWatchDog, a keepalive monitor for the GUI thread. Alive? A fundamental rule when writing applications in event-driven UI frameworks such as Qt is: do not ever block the GUI thread! The GUI thread is also usually called the main thread of the application -- […]

Back in February we wrote about our work to add 'MacOs touch bar' support to Qt. Between then and now, support has been added in QtCreator: However, the changes have not been integrated upstream in Qt, which means there is still no easy way to add support to your own applications. KDAB is happy to […]

Software developers like tools, and in particular tools that make them more productive. So in this blog post, I am going to share with you some of the experiences some of us here at KDAB have had using Visual Studio Code for Qt development. Motivation of using Visual Studio Code instead of Qt Creator The […]

KDDockWidgets is an effort by KDAB to provide an advanced docking system for Qt. Throughout the years KDAB has contributed and funded QDockWidget development. Sadly, this wasn't without pain: each change took many days to implement and an equal amount of time to fix regressions. QDockWidgetmixes GUI code with logic/state in a spaghetti manner, making […]

At KDAB we invest a significant amount of efforts in research and development. We are always looking for new tooling, libraries and utilities that can make our job easier and improve the C++ and Qt ecosystems. Ultimately, the gained knowledge and skills make our customers happier. As part of this process we develop lots of […]

In the previous two blogs in this series I showed how solving an apparently simple problem about loading a lot of data into RAM using mmap() also turned out to require a solution that improved CPU use across cores. In this blog, I’ll show how we dealt with the bottleneck problems that ensued, and finally, […]

We have released version 2.11.0 of our Qt application monitoring tool GammaRay. GammaRay allows you to observe behavior and data structures of Qt code inside your program live at runtime. GammaRay 2.11 comes with a new inspection tool for Qt's event handling, providing even more insights into the inner working of your application. Besides looking […]