Qt 5.8 Now In Beta Form

The Qt Company is ending off their work week by releasing the much-anticipated Qt 5.8 beta.

Qt 5.8 Beta is now shipping with their new configuration system, their graphics changes for the Qt Quick 2D renderer, built-in QML cache, and much more. As covered previously, some of the other work includes an experimental Direct3D 12 back-end for Qt Quick, new Qt Quick Controls 2 additions, Qt WebEngine upgrades, Bluetooth Low Energy improvements, Qt Network improvements, embedded support improvements, and more. New modules for Qt 5.8 coming are the Qt Wayland Compositor, Qt SCXML, Qt Serial Bus, and new platform support is for Apple tvOS and watchOS. There are also technology previews of Qt Gamepad, Qt Speech, and Qt Network Authentication.

The official Qt 5.8 Beta announcement can be read on blog.qt.io. This beta release is shipping one month late with it originally anticipated for 3 October, back when they were hoping to do the official release on 29 November. Now that there's been this delay and the holidays coming up at the end of the year, it's looking possible that Qt 5.8 might not be officially released until January unless they end up trying to get back on track for getting something out before Christmas.