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 […]

We're pleased to announce we've added a new library, KDGpu, to the arsenal of tools we invent to make our lives easier - and then share with you on KDAB's GitHub. Who is this for? If you want to become more productive with Vulkan or learn the concepts of modern explicit graphics APIs, then KDGpu […]

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 […]

The KDAB Training Day will be back in Berlin, at the H4 Hotel Berlin Alexanderplatz, on November 27th this year, right before the annual Qt World Summit, which will happen November 28-29th. Ideal to take part in both events! KDAB is well-known for its quality training courses around Qt/QML, Modern C++, Debugging and Profiling, OpenGL, […]

An important part of working with Vulkan and other modern explicit rendering APIs is the synchronization of GPU/GPU and CPU/GPU workloads. In this article we will learn about what Vulkan needs us to synchronize and how to achieve it. We will talk about two high-level parts of the synchronization domain that we, as application and […]

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! 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 […]

We just released CXX-Qt version 0.5! CXX-Qt is a set of Rust crates for creating bidirectional Rust ⇄ C++ bindings with Qt. It can be used to integrate Rust into C++ applications using CMake or build Rust applications with Cargo. CXX-Qt provides tools for implementing QObject subclasses in Rust that can be used from C++, […]

Not all Qt developers are using Qt Creator as their main IDE for development. Some of us are using other IDEs, like Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code or CLion, per choice or because a project requires it. On Windows, with the MSVC compiler, the debugging experience with Qt 6 can be quite frustrating for some […]

Given a strictly positive integer i, this code will calculate i+1 "equally spaced" values between 1 and 0: If you're looking for a trap, this does actually work for any i > 0. One can verify it experimentally; run the code with i from 1 to INT_MAX. For simplicity, just consider the case j = […]

A very common implementation pattern for QObject subclasses is to declare its child QObjects as data members of type "pointer to child." Raise your hand No, keep your hand on your computer input device :-) Nod if you have ever seen code like this (and maybe even written code like this yourself): A fairly common […]

Are you already convinced and just want to download the library? We're glad you liked it: https://github.com/KDAB/KDAlgorithms I'm sure many people have told you time and time again, "Don't use raw for loops; use algorithms." Still, each time you tried, you found your code harder to read. In case you're wondering, the above simply prints […]

If you're following our Youtube channel you might have heard me talking about QVarLengthArray. If you're not... you should follow us! But let me give you a quick recap. QVarLengthArray is a Qt container that acts like a vector; its elements are stored contiguously in memory and it has a dynamic size. At any time […]

If you’re a reader of this blog, you probably know that we have a huge amount of quality material on QML and Qt Quick, among other topics. In fact, there is so much material that it can be hard to find what you need. If that sounds familiar, you’ll want to bookmark this page! This […]

This blog will give you a brief overview of profiling C and C++ applications. Additionally, it will lay before you all of the tools available, with the purpose of aiding you in choosing the right tools at the right times. The Steps for Profiling Before we look at the actual tools, let's go over the […]

Hotspot 1.4.0 has been released! Hotspot is a replacement for perf report. It's a GUI for the perf profiler that takes a perf.data file, parses and evaluates its contents, and then displays the result in a graphical way. This feature release contains close to 400 commits since the last stable v1.3.0 release. It comes with […]