QtNotepad: Super lightweight and super simple notepad application

Re:QtNotepad: Super lightweight and super simple notepad app... by savolai on Sunday February 10, 2019 @04:15AM (#19127017)

When using qt as dll's, apps typically become several tens of mbs in size in my experience. I'm on Windows though. Is windeployqt extremely suboptimal if this is just 50kb standalone?

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Re:QtNotepad: Super lightweight and super simple notepad app... by int_19h on Sunday February 10, 2019 @05:21AM (#19127192)

It doesn't look like it's actually standalone. The "50KB" on the main page refers to the size of a precompiled Linux binary, which is linked dynamically. So this makes about as much sense as only counting minified JavaScript for the size of an Electron app.

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Re:QtNotepad: Super lightweight and super simple notepad app... by beojan on Sunday February 10, 2019 @05:46AM (#19127248)

It makes a lot of sense, actually, because you probably have Qt installed and loaded already. The norm is to link to this system wide installation, so you don't count it as part of the application. On the other hand, the norm seems to be to ship a fresh copy of Electron with every app, and even if you have a system-wide Electron, it gets loaded anew for every app.

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Re:QtNotepad: Super lightweight and super simple notepad app... by int_19h on Sunday February 10, 2019 @07:37PM (#19131184)

It's the norm on Linux, but not on other platforms.

But either way, Qt5 still has to be installed (and, usually, downloaded) separately in many distros, especially those that are more Gtk-centric.

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Re:QtNotepad: Super lightweight and super simple notepad app... by beojan on Monday February 11, 2019 @03:15AM (#19132809)

I think most people will have at least one Qt app installed. And the screenshot shows that (for once) the target are KDE users.

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Re:QtNotepad: Super lightweight and super simple notepad app... by adgasf on Sunday February 10, 2019 @05:54AM (#19127271)

I think it would be better to ship the Qt DLLs with the app for compatibility reasons. The issue with Electron is not the size of the bundle on disk, but the size of the application in memory.

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Re:QtNotepad: Super lightweight and super simple notepad app... by rootlocus on Sunday February 10, 2019 @04:25AM (#19127046)

From what I remember you need a commercial license to link QT statically so it's unavoidable. I'm guessing linux reuses the shared library, but apps on windows usually ship all DLLs alongside the binary.

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Re:QtNotepad: Super lightweight and super simple notepad app... by jchw on Sunday February 10, 2019 @04:43AM (#19127087)

Qt for X11 was GPL since at least Qt 3, which certainly means you could legally link it with other GPL sources in any manner. I believe Qt 4 went LGPL for all platforms, so now I believe you can link it with pretty much anything that's open source, and dynamically link proprietary applications.

I am not a lawyer and some people disagree with how to interpret the rules of linking, but I think this is mostly the conventional wisdom.

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Re:QtNotepad: Super lightweight and super simple notepad app... by seba_dos1 on Sunday February 10, 2019 @07:06AM (#19127469)

You can link statically LGPL to anything, as long as you provide a way to relink by the user - so, .a or .o files available for download are enough.

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Re:QtNotepad: Super lightweight and super simple notepad app... by IshKebab on Sunday February 10, 2019 @04:48AM (#19127099)

A commercial license, or you license your code as GPL or LGPL.

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Re:QtNotepad: Super lightweight and super simple notepad app... by beojan on Sunday February 10, 2019 @05:43AM (#19127246)

> apps on windows usually ship all DLLs alongside the binary

Can someone tell me why this is the case? Beyond simply not having a package manager to do dependency resolution. You lose most of the benefits of shared libraries if you do this.

This is probably why dynamic linking appears to be decidedly a second-class citizen with Rust and co.

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Re:QtNotepad: Super lightweight and super simple notepad app... by setr on Sunday February 10, 2019 @06:00AM (#19127290)

Afaik, they ship installers usually, not simply a dll binary for their local use; if its installed systemwide, no installation occurs, and if not, its installed system-wide. But the system’s copy is used generally, in either case.

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Re:QtNotepad: Super lightweight and super simple notepad app... by CamperBob2 on Sunday February 10, 2019 @06:10AM (#19127321)

Can someone tell me why this is the case?

Because hard disk space is dirt cheap and my time and sanity are not.

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Re:QtNotepad: Super lightweight and super simple notepad app... by dman on Sunday February 10, 2019 @05:48AM (#19127251)

I dont believe you have to provide source - https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LGPLStaticVsDynami...

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Re:QtNotepad: Super lightweight and super simple notepad app... by de9xvnh7 on Sunday February 10, 2019 @04:54AM (#19127111)

Yeah, lol. Qt and super lightweight don't go hand to hand. I have a spinny hard disk and reading those dozens of megabytes off the hard disk would take a few seconds, as opposed to opening the actual notepad.exe, which is always instantaneous.

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