Qt 5.0 On Apple iOS Might Be In Trouble

One of the targeted mobile platforms to target with Qt 5.0 has been Apple's iOS, but it looks like some technical problems may prevent Qt5 from coming to your iPhone or iPad.

A developer has been taking the early steps to bring Qt5 to iOS, but has hit some serious snags. Besides the fact that Apple's App Store regulations mandate they must use Apple's own JavaScript engine, there are some technical issues with getting the V8 JavaScript interpreter as needed by Qt5 to come to iOS.

One of the problems deals with iOS apps running at reduced privileges and not allowing an app to easily flag data memory as executable and another is that iOS uses a different ARM binary interface than EABI, which may lead to problems bringing V8 over to iOS as well.

From the mailing list message describing these iOS-porting problems, "As this is a bit of a show-stopper as far as I'm concerned (as a widget-only version of Qt5 doesn't add any value over a widget and QML version of Qt4.8), I'm not seeing any point in doing a Qt5 port to iOS if V8 is a hard requirement (unless the above issues can be resolved somehow)...There's no platform plugin yet either, so no way to even test V8 on iOS AFAIK. If anyone knows a way to test V8 without GUI, Declarative or OpenGL, then that may be a starting point at least, because IMHO there's no point in starting a platform plugin until this issue is resolved."