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Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

Oh wow, Qt has moved to CMake as a build system? I remember fighting with qmake back in 2008 and trying to integrate it into our build system (and trying to get it to play nice with bjam for some reason). This is welcome news.

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What's specifically is new that Qt itself is built using cmake. You could use cmake to build apps using Qt for quite a while already.

Did you even need qmake if you understood the MOC subsystem well enough to say write a cmake or gnu make file for it? I didn't think qmake was ever a requirement?

no, it wasn't, but figuring it out all themselves (and not have the project look after it working) is understandably something many people prefer to avoid.

Do they still use Moc?

There was some effort to make it possible to use Qt without moc [0] and instead rely on some more modern C++ features. No clue where the effort is these days

0: https://woboq.com/blog/verdigris-qt-without-moc.html

Now that I'm thinking of it, the Boost C++ libraries have a signals/slot implementation:

https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_63_0/doc/html/signals.html

(probably already superseded by more modern C++ constructs)

There isn't anything in boost, and even less in c++20 that gets anywhere close to the codegen & runtime reflection that Qt provides. We need reflection & metaclasses/constexpr code generation but the way it looks it won't be in before c++26.

yes.

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