Qt 5.8 Alpha is out. The announcement was made today and that means the Alpha version of Qt 5.8 is now available for download and testing.
This minor Qt version comes with several bug fixes and improvements and follows the recent release of the stable version of Qt 5.7 a few week prior.
What to Expect With Qt 5.8 Alpha
On top of the bug fixes and improvements to the existing code there are a few new items of interest.
First off Qt Speech and Qt Network Authentication which features OAuth support have both been added as technology previews. The the Serial Bus, SCXML and Wayland Compositor which have previously been technology previews are now fully supported in this new version of Qt.
Tailored builds of Qt are now supported. This allows developers to now deal with only the modules they require without having to work with a library that contains everything. This is made possible through the Qt Lite Project and Configuration. This will benefit especially developers working on embedded systems where RAM and storage is limited.
Qt 5.8 Alpha comes with a new graphics architecture for Qt Quick. It is now more agnostic with regards to the graphics API and does not lock one into OpenGL. It now includes a back-end based on DirectX 12 for rendering Qt Quick controls.
The QML engine now comes with a new caching infrastructure that can cache the QML files in a precompiled binary form. This helps reduce memory consumption and speeds up loading of QML applications once the cache has been created.
For these and more you can check out the new features page here. You go and download Qt 5.8 Alpha from here.
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