QML and QtQuick suggestions for advanced users

Hi,

I really love the QML language and QtQuick, it's really easy to create custom views and controls with custom styling, and really convenient for creating a good UI experience.

But as an advance QML/QtQuick user I have some frustrations that I think could be really easy to fix and that would definitivelly be a game changer for Qt:

Enhanced C++ API for QtQuick:
This is probably the most frustrating ones, but a lot of basic QtQuick components are private and made really difficult to integrate or create new powerfull and optimized controls.

For example I recently tryed to implements a masonry like view (https://masonry.desandro.com/), but without subclassing Flickable from C++ it's either a mess to implements or a performance issue. It would be really nice and powerfull that Flickable (QQuickFlickable) become a public API in QtQuick c++ module. Since it would prevent us to links again Qt private API.

There is a non-exaustive list of other items I really would love to become C++ available in such manner:

• Flickable (For the reason explained above)
• Text (As it would be convenient to create it from C++)
• Transition (Would be a tricky one maybe, but will allow us to create custom transition for our custom view, will probably need some other API to manipulate it).
• Control (As it would allow us to implements a custom control and tacking advantages of all existings features of controls)

This could be a start and the following ones may be a plus:

• Some Control generic classes, like AbstractButton or Container.
• ApplicationWindow, Popup and Dialog.

Binding reference

I would be nice to have some kind of binding references available in the core language, like in SwiftUI for example.

For now to create a proper bidirectionnal binding we have to make something like this:

TextField {
    text: myDataModel.someTextProperty
    onEditingFinished: myDataModel.someTextProperty = text
}

It would be really convenient to have something like this:

TextField {
   text: &myDataModel.someTextProperty
}

Or any kind of symbol (Swift use $) or even a global function.

So the text propery could be like a BindingReference<QString> and the & operator could return a BindingReference<QString> instead of a binding to a QString.

A BindingReference<QString> will allow the control to send back a value to the model.

Of course the original synthax should still work, for special cases, so a BindingReference<QString> could accept a simple QString binding. In that case sending back a value from the control will send a warning. The BindingReference<T> should have some kind of canWrite property to prevents the warning.

This is a start, but these two suggestions will be I think a real game changing.