The LeanQt project has begun the development of a streamlined fork of Qt 5, aimed at simplifying the building from source code and integration with applications. LeanQt is developed by Rochus Keller, the creator of the compiler and development environment for the Oberon language, which is tied to Qt 5, with the goal of simplifying the compilation of his product with minimal dependencies while still supporting current platforms. The code continues to evolve under the GPLv3, LGPLv2.1, and LGPLv3 licenses.
It has been noted that in recent years, there has been a trend of bloat in Qt, overly complex mechanisms, and controversial functionality, with binary installations requiring registration on a commercial company's website and downloading over a gigabyte of data. LeanQt attempts to create a lightweight version of Qt 5.6.3, cleansed of unnecessary elements and structurally redesigned. Instead of qmake, a proprietary build system called BUSY is used. Additional options have been proposed, allowing various key components to be optionally included or excluded during the build.
Support for the following Qt features is claimed:
- Byte arrays, strings, unicode.
- Localization.
- Collections, implicit data sharing.
- Handling dates, times, and time zones.
- Variant type and metatypes.
- Encodings: utf, simple, latin.
- Abstraction of input/output devices.
- File engine.
- Text streams and data streams.
- Regular expressions.
- Logging.
- MD5 and SHA1 hashes.
- Geometric primitives, JSON and XML.
- RCC (resource compiler).
- Multithreading.
- Ability to build for Linux, Windows, and macOS.
Among the near-term plans: support for plugins, basic objects, metatypes and events, QtNetwork and QtXml modules.
Distant plans: QtGui and QtWidgets modules, printing output, parallel processing operations, and support for serial ports.
The following will not be supported: qmake, State Machine framework, advanced encodings, animation, multimedia, D-Bus, SQL, SVG, NFC, Bluetooth, web engine, testlib, scripting, and QML. Platforms not to be supported include iOS, WinRT, Wince, Android, Blackberry, nacl, vxWorks, and Haiku.
Source: opennet.ru
