Qt 6.3 Beta Published With Wayland Improvements, New Features

Ahead of the planned release of Qt 6.3.0 next month, The Qt Company today has made available the first Qt 6.3 beta.

Qt 6.3 Beta 1 is the first of at least three planned beta milestones before moving to a release candidate phase in early March. Qt 6.3 has been aiming for a 16 March release but their development milestones have been running behind schedule so it's likely the final release will slip into late March if not early April.

Qt 6.3 includes a new "Qt Language Server" module, a number of new functions in the Qt Core module, Qt Quick has added a MessageDialog that will provide a native dialog message box on supported platforms, "qmltc" as the new QML type compiler, the Qt Wayland Compositor module adds a Qt Shell that supports all windowing system features handled by Qt, Qt Wayland can now support creating custom shell extensions, support for Wayland's Presentation Time protocol, and other new features and improvements.

The new Qt Language Server module with Qt 6.3 implements the Language Server Protocol (LSP) specification and JsonRpc 2.0 protocol for allowing better integration with source code editors / IDEs. The new QML Type Compiler compiles QML object structures into C++ classes while the new QML Script Compiler will compile functions and expressions into C++ code. There is also a new QML Lint for spotting code that may not translate well with the new compilers. The Qt Company expects that this new QML compiler work will result up to 30% speed-ups for the start-up and execution time.

More details on today's Qt 6.3 Beta 1 release over on Qt.io.