The amount of editorial in this post is mind blowing. Am I the only one who found it extremely hard (yes, extremely) to sift through all the blurb of text. In the end, I am not even sure what is being released.
<i>The new configuration system in Qt, allows your define the content you need from each module in much more detail for your project and easily allows for feature based tailoring of the Qt modules. We are starting with enabling this fully for Qt Core, Qt Network, Qt GUI, Qt QML and Qt Quick. You can now fine tune which features from these modules you want to include in your project. There is no longer any need to include unnecessary features.</i><p>To be clear, this potentially reduces binary sizes, but it does not by itself change run-time performance.<p><i>No Open GL Requirement ... The Qt Quick 2D renderer can work in software only, but it is also designed to utilize accelerated 2D operations, for devices that packs a little bit more punch, but still doesn’t have full OpenGL support.</i><p>I wonder what kinds of devices this is intended for? Presumably, they are a very important market for Qt to have implemented this? And these devices have graphics displays but they lack GPUs? What device could that be?<p>CPU software rendering seems like a step backwards for performance. GPUs and OpenGL must be more energy efficient at this task than software rendering, and I would imagine that important embedded devices with graphics displays must all have GPUs or will in the future?<p>I would have thought that "Qt for any platform" would include web browser (WebAssembly / Emscripten / WebGL) but no such luck. Based on the title, I thought this was going to be some drastic optimization of Qt's GUI. It doesn't sound like that's the case.<p>I haven't used Qt on embedded devices, but I've looked at several demos of Qt compiled to JavaScript with Emscripten [1] and the results seem very slow. Part of the reason seems to be that these Emscripten demos have Qt falling back to software rendering, instead of using WebGL accelerated rendering ... I don't think that another software rendering backend for Qt solves this problem.<p>[1] <a href="http://vps2.etotheipiplusone.com:30176/redmine/projects/emscripten-qt/wiki/Demos" rel="nofollow">http://vps2.etotheipiplusone.com:30176/redmine/projects/emsc...</a>
"At least for now, the configuration tooling will be a part of the Qt for Device Creation product, and not open source."<p>I do wonder how a lot of companies's dual license model is going to interact with the IoT / embedded world.