Releasing Qt applications on Windows

After the development stage, you can build your application using release as the build configuration. In the release configuration, your compiler will optimize the code and won't produce debug symbols, which in turn reduces the size. Please ensure that the project is in the release configuration.

Before we jump into the packaging procedure, I'd like to talk about the difference between static and dynamic linking. You have probably been using dynamic linking of Qt libraries throughout this book. This can be confirmed if you download the Community Edition from the Qt website.

So, what does dynamic linking mean? Well, it means that when an executable file gets executed, the operating system will load and link the necessary shared libraries at runtime. In other words, you'll see a lot of .dll files on Windows and .so files on the Unix platforms. This technique allows developers to update these shared libraries and the executable separately, which means that...