Qt 6.6 Nears Release With RC Offered Up For Testing

Qt 6.6 is nearing release for this open-source and cross-platform toolkit while out this morning is the release candidate.

Qt 6.6 is set to bring many new features including a more robust Wayland compositor experience, support to the Qt GUI Module for direct access to OpenType features of used fonts, the QRhi family of classes for the Qt Rendering Hardware Interface is now fully documented, the Qt Quick Shapes module adds an experimental curve rendering back-end, support for importing PLY files with Qt Quick 3D, initial Render Extensions support for Qt Quick 3D, Qt SQL adds a Mimer SQL plug-in, and Qt TextToSpeech improvements.

Qt 6.6 does ship a new module: Qt Graphs. The Qt Graphs module is to serve as a replacement to Qt Data Visualization and uses Qt Quick 3D for rendering with native graphics back-end support. Qt Graphs ultimately will provide most if not all functionality provided by Qt Data Visualization.

The Qt 6.6 release candidate was announced on the mailing list. If all goes well the Qt 6.6 stable release will be out around 10 October. Qt 6.6 is all the more important with KDE Plasma 6.0 and the first round of Qt6-ported KDE Gear apps due for release in early February.