As a medical device founder, I personally wouldn't start any new projects in C++, unless I had realtime requirements. Embedded computers are performant enough today that you can easily write app code in safe languages with great tooling, and wont have to worry about complying with increasingly stringent V&V and memory safety standards from the FDA. And if I had to write c++, I'd use libraries and toolchains that were actually verified and had really great FDA quality documentation, which this project does not.
Somebody has a bee in their bonnet about a decision in C++ 20 and so we get a project to "fork" some apparently important C++ library so as to fix everything they don't like about it. It's years of rants about how the modern kids just don't understand, condensed into this one fork proposal, so I guess that's efficient at least.
Thats a lot of red flags to put on your landing page.<p>Modern C++ standards are the bare minimum you should enforce in terms of software safety and correctness.
From their manifesto:<p>> Long ago there was an OpenSource library called Qt. When it was C++ and Widgets, it was great. Then the library lost its way and became focused on phones. It also became dramatically less "open" and much more "you have to buy a license." The C++ Widgets side of the library withered as resources were poured into a non-typesafe worthless thing called QML. This was well after making a play for the medical device market. You can't use non-typesafe junk when lives are on the line.<p>Their writing style is a serious turn-off.
I've heard about CopperSpice before, but I've never personally seen any project use it. Still, it seems they have some passionate developers behind it and actual users. Forking it just because you don't like some newer compiler standard seems a rather bad reason. Do the LsCs developer(s) have the same passion and resources to keep their fork up to date? How are their getting users? Are they going to stick with C++17 forever while the rest of the world moves on? While forks sometimes are a good thing, I'd first try to help the original developers to achieve "creat[ing] something prepackaged and widely usable".
Why is it a good idea for a GUI library to behave like a framework-of-all-things, from basic data structures, OpenGL library, XML library, Javascript engine etc.? CopperSpice does this, and it seems so does Qt and probably this new LS-CS fork of CopperSpice.
Good luck!<p>I developed a successful medical device on Qt 4.8 and can attest that it was a joy to work with.<p>Not sure about how the FDA would feel about an old framework. I don't think they would care too much or it would become anymore easy to provide software verification.
So that's a fork of a ~10 years old fork of Qt. Copperspice originally forked, in part, because Qt was not close enough to the C++ standards, and now this (outdated) GUI library is being forked because they make use of a 4 years old C++ standard.
Someone should fork LsCs to add support for mobile or new C++ standard. Looking forward to see this happen in 10 years (/s)