Continuing with Day 12 of my December Adventure, I decided to make the most of the little momentum I’ve built up around OpoLua over the past few days and continue working on Qt builds.

I had an outstanding branch with macOS Qt builds from the early days of development, so I cautiously cherry-picked the relevant changes to see if it still built. Much to my surprise, it did! I followed my usual pragmatic approach of hand-crafting a simple build script rather than trying to use any magic tooling; something I have found to be significantly more maintainable over the lifetime of a project. You can check out the full change here if you’re curious.

At this early stage, I’m making no attempt to publish the binaries—we need to update the OpoLua license to conform to Qt’s requirements around statically linking before we can do that. For the time being this will help give us greater confidence that we’re not breaking things, and allow us to test our work.

Having broken the back of—at least—the macOS Qt builds, I found my thoughts returning to the incredibly absurd and unsustainable situation we’ve found ourselves in: centralized web-based infrastructure, lock-in, spiralling service prices, aggressive deployment of unproven AI, inflation, and skyrocketing consumer hardware prices. These trends concern me, and I’m worried that, even though I try to build open tooling, by targeting closed platforms like macOS and iOS, I play a part in perpetuating this imbalance.