![]() ![]() I’m going to spell them out here to save you that pain. ![]() Moving from producing an Intel binary using LGPL Qt to producing a Universal binary using commercial Qt involved several major stumbling points that took me hours and a lot of googling to sort out. The push towards commercial licensing is controversial with Qt developers, but I really appreciate Qt and all the work that goes into it, so I am happy to support the business (not enough to pay the eye-watering fee for a full enterprise license though!). Thankfully I was eligible for the Qt small business license which is currently $499 per year. So I decided to switch from the free LGPL license and buy a commercial Qt license. I also want access to all the latest bug fixes for Qt 5. I want to use the QtCharts component in Easy Data Transform v2, and QtCharts requires a commercial license (or GPL, which is a no-go for me). Qt 5.15.3 and later are only available to Qt customers with commercial licenses. ![]() I am sticking with Qt 5 for now, because it better supports multiple text encodings and because I don’t see any particular advantage to switching to Qt 6 yet. Qt announced support for Mac Universal binaries in Qt 6.2 and Qt 5.15.9. My software is built on-top of the excellent Qt cross-platfom framework. Hopefully I will have retired before the next chip change on the Mac. This is a process familiar from moving my seating planner software for Mac from PowerPC to Intel chips some years ago. So I have been investigating moving Easy Data Transform from an Intel binary to a Universal (‘fat') binary containing both Intel and ARM binaries. Also people who have just spent a small fortune on a shiny new ARM Mac can get grumpy about not having a native ARM binary to run on it. That may not seem like a lot, but it is significant on processor intensive applications such as my own data wrangling software, which often processes datasets with millions of rows through complex sequences of merging, splitting, reformatting, filtering and reshaping. The emulation works very well, but is quoted to be some 20% slower than running native ARM binaries. In the process it has provided an emulation layer (Rosetta2) to ensure that the new ARM Macs can still run applications created for Intel Macs. Apple has transitioned Macs from Intel to ARM (M1/M2) chips. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |