With the recent release of Qt 5.12, Tuukka Turunen, vice president in charge of "Research and Development" at the Qt Company, offers us, as every year since 2016, an overview of future developments for the framework.
First Qt 5.12 will continue its development cycle, with patches and performance improvements, such as a third version of Qt 5 with long-term support (compared to the two previous versions, Qt 5.6.3). and Qt 5.9.7, there are also slightly more than five thousand corrections respectively). Qt Quick and Qt 3D will be the focus of attention, among others.
Qt 5.12 has provided an official binding layer with Python this module does not deal with the long-term support of Qt 5.12 as its development is not mature enough yet. In addition to the reliability of the code, should be easier to integrate with current Python libraries (In C ++, Qt must offer many features, the standard library is poor in comparison, and other libraries are much less standardized than in Python.)
In this year 2019 we should at least see an integration with numpy for scientific computing, including a powerful implementation of arrays.
Qt will also open to the Web with Web Assembly: since Qt 5.13, it is possible to compile a Qt application in a Web Assembly module to start it in a browser (the possibility is older, but it is considered finished only with Qt 5.13).
However, development is currently only possible desde Linux and macOS: Windows will be added to the list.
On the features side, it will be possible to access the local file system (within the limits of the sandboxes implemented by browsers).
For Qt 5.13 animations brought a new module, Qt Lottie, Bodymovin made in Adobe After Effects.
Qt Lottie makes it easy to include these animations in Qt Quick applications, but also to control them (start, pause, etc.). The module has been designed so that the performance can be used on embedded platforms. It should come out of the tech prediction this year.
Development tools
The latest versions of Qt Creator have greatly reworked the C ++ engine, to use Clang.
The benefits come, with an integration with Clang Tidy and Clazy. Other diagnostic and performance analysis tools will come in during this year.
The EDI itself should see improved performance, with the use of a symbol database for the loaded project, rather than having to parse the files one by one as the code is written.
How to Live Aligned with CMake seems to be the build tool of choice for Qt 6Qt Creator since it is possible to work with CMake projects, but it is not always as easy as with the old project format used by Qt (the famous .pro files). This will make it easier to create a CMake project, among others.
Qt Quick Designer, the visual editor for Qt Quick integrated with Qt Creator, will benefit from some features developed for Qt Design Studio (the latter developed on the same basis as Qt Creator). Soon we should see the Qt Design Studio timeline in Qt Quick Designer.
Tools for graphic designers
One of The big projects in 2019 on tools for graphic designers will be to unify the 2D and 3D design tools, to offer a single application (with specific capabilities for 2D and 3D interfaces).
With which we should see shared components, better interoperability, and unified installation tools. The running time of Qt 3D Studio will also be improved.
Qt Design Studio should see new drawing tools, a new transition curve editor, and a property editor, three items that should also be in Qt 3D Studio. It will be easier to work with multiple monitors, for example with floating panels.
Qt 3D Studio will be entitled to some nice performance improvements, with versions 2.3 in March and 2.4 in June.
New rendering engines and animation systems have reduced CPU utilization, accelerated loading of 3D content, and reduced memory consumption.
The goal for 2019 is to have complex, real-time 3D applications running on not necessarily high-end hardware.