You were not doing so wrong.

In his blog post, Brad explains that he saw many users misusing QThread by sub-classing it, adding some slots to that subclass and doing something like this in the constructor:

 moveToThread(this);

They move a thread to itself. As Brad mentions, it is wrong: the QThread is supposed to be the interface to manage the thread. So it is supposed to be used from the creating thread.

Slots in the QThread object are then not run in that thread and having slots in a subclass of QThread is a bad practice.

But then Brad continues and discourages any sub-classing of QThread at all. He claims it is against proper object-oriented design. This is where I disagree. Putting code in run() is a valid object-oriented way to extend a QThread: A QThread represents a thread that just starts an event loop, a subclass represents a thread that is extended to do what's in run().

After Brad's post, some members of the community went on a crusade against sub-classing QThread. The problem is that there are many perfectly valid reasons to subclass QThread.

With Qt 5.0 and Qt 4.8.4, the documentation of QThread was changed so the sample code does not involve sub-classing. Look at the first code sample of the Qt 4.8 QThread documentation. It has many lines of boiler plate just to run some code in a thread. And the there is even a leak: the QThread is never going to quit and be destroyed.

I was asked on IRC a question from an user who followed that example in order to run some simple code in a thread. He had a hard time to figure out how to properly destroy the thread. That is what motivated me to write this blog entry.

If you allow to subclass QThread, this is what you got:

classWorkerThread : publicQThread {voidrun() {// ...
    }
};voidMyObject::startWorkInAThread()
{WorkerThread *workerThread = newWorkerThread;connect(workerThread, SIGNAL(finished()),workerThread, SLOT(deleteLater()));workerThread->start();
}

This code does no longer leak and is much simpler and has less overhead as it does not create useless object.

The Qt threading examplethreadedfortuneserver is an example that uses this pattern to run blocking operations and is much simpler than the equivalent using a worker object.

I have submitted a patch to the documentation to not discourage sub-classing QThread anymore.

Rules of thumbs

When to subclass and when not to?

• If you do not really need an event loop in the thread, you should subclass.
• If you need an event loop and handle signals and slots within the thread, you may not need to subclass.

What about using QtConcurrent instead?

QThread is a quite low level and you should better use a higher level API such as QtConcurrent.

Now, QtConcurrent has its own set of problems: It is tied to a single thread pool so it is not a good solution if you want to run blocking operations. It has also some problems in its implementation that gives some performance overhead. All of this is fixable. Perhaps even Qt 5.1 will see some improvements.

A good alternative is also the C++11 standard library withstd::thread and std::async which are now the standard way to run code in a thread. And the good news is that it still works fine with Qt: All other Qt threading primitives can be used with native threads. (Qt will create automatically create a QThread if required).