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Qt 5.8 Release has Been Announced for General Availability

Qt 5.8 release has been announced for immediate availability with lots of goodies and some major enhancements over the previous Qt 5.7 series. It also comes with a fresh new release of Qt Creator 4.2.1.

Qt is a framework for developing cross platform applications in C++, QML and JavaScript. It comes with its own set of tools including its own Qt Creator Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

What’s Exciting About the new Qt 5.8 Release?

The biggest addition to this release is the new Qt Lite which allows embedded developers customize their applications to suit their exact needs consequently cutting down on memory and hardware requirements while increasing performance and ease of maintenance.

This is achieved by making highly modular allowing components to be left out as needed. The other benefit of this project is the code base has also gotten an overhaul over what was there over the previous decade or more.

The Qt Wayland Compositor API is now fully supported in from this Qt 5.8 release going forward. This also targets embedded devices allowing custom home screens on the said devices. This allows for configurations where multiple apps can be run off the device sharing the home screen.

As for Qt QML and Qt Quick, The QML Engine now supports on disk catching of QML and JavaScript resources therefore speeding up startup times and memory of applications using this feature.

As for Qt Quick Controls 2, new types such as dialogs, rounded buttons, tool separators, materials and Universal styles have either been added or have been enhanced with new effects and system themes.

The Qt Quick scene graph is now less dependent on OpenGL and comes with added experimental support for Direct3D 12 and Vulkan graphics APIs. Performance improvements are now in place with the scene graphs ability to update sections of the screen that have changed rather than complete refreshes.

Qt SCXML is now fully supported making integration of SCXML based state machines into Qt a breeze. Also added is Qt Creator 4.2 support for editing state charts. The Qt Webengine has been updated to Chromium 53 with support for printing web pages and new QML APIs.

Qt Serialbus is now fully supported in Qt 5.8. allowing use of Qt APIs for device bus communications and protocols. Qt Network and Web Sockets now have full support for TLS PSK cyphersuites with Qt Network supporting configurable Diffie-Hellman parameters and HTTP/2 in QNetworkAccessManager.

Qt Bluetooth now has BTLE Peripheral support on macOS and iOS and BTLE Central support on WinRT.

Qt Speech has been added as a new technology preview module adding support to text to speech functionality using the underlying systems native APIs as well as Qt Network Authorization supporting the OAuth 1 and 2 authentication schemes.

With that said there are lots of bug fixes and improvements and additional feature updates as highlighted in the official features page. You can get yourself a copy of the Qt 5.8 Release from the download page or the Qt account portal. For those with the Qt maintenance tool you can go ahead and update it directly.

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