[vbox-dev] Why is IPRT a VirtualBox library ?

[Michal Necasek]

 In addition to what Alexander already said (i.e. Qt is not technically usable as an IPRT replacement at all), there is another major reason: We have no intention of making core VirtualBox depend on Qt. The Qt-based GUI is only one (albeit very important) aspect of VirtualBox.

 And I highly doubt the Qt developers would be very interested in patches making Qt work in strictly C-only kernel context, for example.

  - Michal

----- Original Message -----
From: al4321 at gmail.com
To: vbox-dev at virtualbox.org
Sent: Sunday, April 12, 2015 11:18:45 AM GMT +01:00 Amsterdam / Berlin / Bern / Rome / Stockholm / Vienna
Subject: [vbox-dev] Why is IPRT a VirtualBox library ?

I mean why Qt Core can't be used as a cross-platform generic library
for strings, sockets, files and the like ?
What IPRT does sounds fairly generic.
Maybe Qt Core can be used both for COM backend and frontend.

Perhaps "upstreaming", i.e. patching Qt where necessary would ease the burden.

Same is true for many GUI stuff, like custom VBox File picker, that in
theory should go into Qt -- QFileDialog::getOpenFileName().

The problem with VirtualBox specific code, is that there is no good
documentation for internal APIs, and therefore hard to code for
external developers. But the question is: Is this extra complexity and
wrappers really needed ?

Good news, is that there is good documentation for official APIs, the
VirtualBox SDK. Makes life easier.

This is why I use Sockets API instead of iprt/tcp.h (for now) -- many
tutorials for it on the net.
Makefile (kmk) system is also complex and undocumented, and hard to
debug to add new features.
-- 
-Alexey Eromenko "Technologov"

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