You can try to add binary mode to the project files, can’t hurt to test.
My only concern is that it will just hide the actual problem, that Boost don’t work properly with MinGW/MSYS2. This is of course just my theory, could be something else.
We should have a minimal Qt/C++ project that is able to load a project file and output the time used to load/parse, then build it (and Boost) against MSYS2, MXE and MSVC. Then we at last know if it’s a MinGW, Boost or Natron issue.
You can make PRs on RB-2.4, they will be reviewed and merged if valid.
All changes to RB-2.4 will be merged into RB-2.5.
However, new features should not be introduced in RB-2.4, so please guard new features with #ifdef/#endif so that we can built the releases without these at the moment (including the bug-fix release 2.4.2). You can enable these features in your config.pri using DEFINES += MY_NEW_FEATURE.
The roadmap for Natron is to maintain features, fix bugs, and upgrade the base libraries: