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Giuseppe D’Angelo
28 February 2017
Qt 5.8 has just been released! Another great release of Qt, made possible by thousands of commits by over a hundred different contributors:
Commit percentages to Qt in the last 16 weeks, grouped by employer
And here we are again, with the usual showcase of the most outstanding contributions to Qt 5.8 developed by KDAB engineers.
In no particular order:
Qt 3D continues to receive lots of improvements and bugfixes, thanks to the hard work of several KDAB engineers. In general, we've greatly improved the test coverage, added more documentation to the public APIs, and fixed a large number of bugs across all of Qt 3D. If you are testing Qt 3D and you are encountering bugs, try upgrading to Qt 5.8.
Other improvements and changes include:
Last, but not least, a lot of work went into optimizing Qt 3D's rendering backend:
KDAB's Senior Software Engineer Mike Krus added support for the tvOS operating system to Qt 5.8. Since he was there, he was also appointed tvOS platform maintainer.
At this stage, the tvOS platform is still a Technical Preview, aiming to become fully supported in the upcoming Qt versions. Support for the tvOS controller was also added to the qtgamepad
module.
These three macros allow you to generate meta-object information for enumerations and flags defined at the namespace level, that is, without an enclosing class with the Q_OBJECT or the Q_GADGET macro. The meta-object information is available in C++ and in QML. Stay tuned for a dedicated blog post!
Again in no particular order:
QT_NO_NARROWING_CONVERSIONS_IN_CONNECT
macro was introduced. When this macro is defined, and when using the PFM-based QObject::connect (the "new style" connect), implicit but narrowing conversions between the arguments of a signal and a slot are disabled.QObject::dumpObjectInfo
and QObject::dumpObjectTree
are now fully functional even in a non-debug build of Qt, such as the builds installed using the official binary installers. This should help developers gain debug information about their QObject hierarchies. Of course, for anything more complex there's GammaRay ;-)QMAKE_CD
qmake variable was introduced. This variable allows to correctly change directories on all operating systems (on Windows, changing a directory to one on another drive requires special attention).Once more, KDAB confirms its commitment and investment into making Qt the best cross-platform UI framework. Stay tuned for more in-depth blogs about some of the changes introduced in Qt 5.8. In the meanwhile, you can download Qt 5.8 here.
Happy hacking!
About KDAB
The KDAB Group is a globally recognized provider for software consulting, development and training, specializing in embedded devices and complex cross-platform desktop applications. In addition to being leading experts in Qt, C++ and 3D technologies for over two decades, KDAB provides deep expertise across the stack, including Linux, Rust and modern UI frameworks. With 100+ employees from 20 countries and offices in Sweden, Germany, USA, France and UK, we serve clients around the world.
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