We have released version 2.8.0 of our Qt application introspection tool GammaRay. GammaRay allows you to observe behavior and data structures of Qt code inside your program live at runtime. A big focus in this release is improvements to the Qt Quick inspector, which gained layout helper grids and Qt Quick Controls 2 tracing, as […]

As there were some complex issues around conformity in PDF document creation within Qt, KDAB let me spend some time digging into it so we could make sure that Qt's PDF engine generates documents up to ISO-standard. Nowadays, many official institutions have the requirement to archive their data digitally and PDF is a first class […]

Qt 5.9 has just been released! This release marks two important milestones for the Qt Project. The first is that now the Qt 5 series has had more releases than any other Qt version ever (the last release of the Qt 4 series was Qt 4.8). The second milestone is that Qt 5.9 will be […]

In the beginning there was … That’s how things start, right? And in the beginning there were punch cards. The UI was rudimentary direct machine language, so we could say there was no UI.So let there be light! In very simplistic terms that was a screen where one could type text (using a keyboard) and […]

The last blog post in this series described how to use string-views. This post is about how to design one. In particular, it's about QStringView's constructors. They evolved through a rapid succession of changes. These changes either fixed ambiguities between QString and QStringView overloads, or improved performance. And they all have the same solution: std::enable_if, […]

QZXing is a very useful library: It provides an easy to use Qt integration API around the barcode scanning library ZXing (zebras crossing). Because it is so easy to setup QZXing in a Qt application, we and most of our customers end up using it when they need to scan images for barcodes. There is, […]

In a previous blog post we introduced clazy, a clang plugin which makes the compiler understand Qt semantics, allowing you to get compile-time warnings about Qt best practices ranging from unneeded memory allocations to misuse of API, including fix-its for automatic refactoring. Today we'll do a round-up and present the checks related to connect statements, […]

As an Easter treat here is a quick taster of some of the animation goodies coming to Qt 3D along with Qt 5.9. In this post we will briefly outline the steps needed to create a simple Qt 3D application and the assets it uses to produce this little animation: The basic steps are: Create […]

A small new feature that I have added to Qt 5.8 is the possibility of disabling narrowing conversions in the new-style QObject::connect statement. In this short blog post I would like to share with you why I thought this was useful and therefore implemented it. The problem Since Qt 5.0, the new-style, PMF-based (pointer to […]

After two months of intensive reviews, discussions, fixes, and stripping down the initial commit, feature by feature, to make it acceptable, I am happy to announce that the first QStringView commits have landed in what will eventually become Qt 5.10. Even the docs are already on-line. This is a good time to briefly recapitulate what […]

This blog series will introduce the clang-tidy utility from the Clang/LLVM project and show how to use it to automatically refactor C++ source code and integrate with your build system, as well as how to use the tool on other platforms than Unices. Motivation: The joy of legacy code bases C++11 added a significant amount […]

All Qt developers have asked themselves at least once in their careers: "why isn't my slot invoked?" (I've asked myself that question many, many times). There are a number of reasons why a connection may fail to be properly set up, and ultimately cause our slot not to be invoked. This blog post is a […]

A small new feature that was added to Qt 5.8 is the ability for moc (Qt's meta-object compiler) to extract meta-object information at the namespace level. This means, for instance, that you can have introspection support for enumerations defined in a namespace (not just in QObject subclasses, or classes tagged with Q_GADGET), and use such […]

I'm extremely happy to finally announce the first stable release of heaptrack, the FOSS heap memory profiler for C/C++ Linux applications. You can download the source tarball from the KDE mirrors: https://download.kde.org/stable/heaptrack/1.0.0/src/ Heaptrack is a fast heap memory profiler that runs on Linux. It allows you to track all heap memory allocations at run-time. Afterwards, […]

Qt 5.8 has just been released! Another great release of Qt, made possible by thousands of commits by over a hundred different contributors: And here we are again, with the usual showcase of the most outstanding contributions to Qt 5.8 developed by KDAB engineers. In no particular order: Qt 3D Qt 3D continues to receive […]

We have released version 2.7 of our Qt application introspection tool GammaRay. GammaRay allows you to observe the behavior and data structures of Qt code inside your program live at runtime. Here are a few of the highlights of this release: The new Qt 3D geometry inspector allows you to look at a wireframe rendering […]

Knowing what tools are at your disposal when looking to make a program faster or keep it operating smoothly is critical to your success as a programmer. We recently solved a performance problem using Linux Kernel Tracepoints so we thought we’d share the process with you so that you can see for yourself if this […]

In the last blog post we gave a very high level introduction to the Qt Quick 2 renderer. We also showed how various signals are emitted by the renderer during the synchronization and rendering steps. In this blog post we're going to discuss those signals and show how they can be used to implement overlays […]

This is the first in a series of blog posts on QStringView, the std::u16string_view equivalent for Qt. You can read about QStringView in my original post to the Qt development mailing-list, follow its status by tracking the "qstringview" topic on Gerrit and learn about string views in general in Marshall Clow's CppCon 2015 talk, aptly […]

In the last days, I was once again trying to convince fellow programmers that there's no such thing as a "benign" data race. This is a recurring theme, in particular fueled by the docs of MSVC and Intel x86, which basically seem to say "you don't need atomics here". I perused the excellent papers Benign […]