QtCS2021 - Qt Creator Feedback

Session Summary

Let's talk about the current state of Qt Creator, and where it's heading. Please join if you have feedback or (constructive) opinions on Qt Creator :)

Session Owners

• Kai Köhne (kai.koehne@qt.io)
• Alessandro Portale (alessandro.portale@qt.io)

Notes

Quick Intro and slides by Kai

• Exlplaining Release schedule / Upcoming versioning scheme
• Qt 6 support:
  • As target Qt version
  • As Qt version to build Qt Creator against (Qt Creator 6): qtpaths, qmldom, maoOS universal, Tracing lib.
• Containerized toolchains
  • Why support them?
  • Current state (state report by anp)
• Clangd
  • Using via LSP
  • Persistent AST
  • Feedbak: Please work on persistence. Parsing is too slow.

Discussion

• Debugger window positioning is missing keyboard accessibility. And user-defined positions seem to get too frequently reset to default.
• Collaborative editing. Building blocks are missing.
• Request for an ARCHITECTURE.md for easier diving into contributing to Qt Creator. Perhaps start with a Video? Also feel free to ask for help on IRC/ML.
• Better refatoring support. Support the "standard refactoring actions", offered by other IDEs. Build on top of "built-in" code model? Or on top of clang tooling?
• Qt Creator takes much more memory than it used to do. Caused by clang-tooling? Will temporarily get worse (until clang takes over)
• Memory and CPU consuption infor per plugin.
• Use Advanced-Docking-System docking system, like Qt Design Studio does?
• Android: Attaching debugger to running application and logging is flaky. Need better overview of what works in which combination and what not. Kind of like in: QTCREATORBUG-25030
• Opening top level Qt (or other big projects) makes Qt Creator freeze. Excessive QML/C++ parsing and Test scanning. It is reproducable by several users, but not yet studied.
• Improve Python support? Debugging via PDB? Should already work for basic projects, but needs to be looked at. make Qt Creator less scary for Python developers.
• Ad-hoc loading plugins needed for a specific plugin? Didn't we start something like that based on mimetypes?
• Too many configuration runs of CMake. Document how to optimize that as user, also further investigate actual bugs in that area.