The Best Features Coming With Qt 5.3

Qt 5.3 will be officially released in a few days time if all goes well and with this update to the Qt5 tool-kit comes some major new features.

For those not keeping up closely with the Qt 5.3 development over the past half-year, fortunately at Phoronix we have you covered. Here's some of the features that interest me most about the imminent Qt 5.3 tool-kit release:

- OpenGL ES 3.0 and desktop OpenGL are now fully supported via EGL.

- Native text rendering is now functional with OpenGL 3.2+ core profiles.

- Qt 5.3 by default for 32-built builds now depends upon SSE2 CPU support. SSE2 CPUs have been around for the past decade and building code optimized for SSE2+ will yield better performance. SSE2 has been found since Intel Pentium 4 CPUs and for AMD hardware since the Opteron / Athlon 64 debut. Those building Qt 5.3 i386 binaries wishing to support ancient CPUs can pass -no-sse2 to still maintain pre-SSE2 compatibility.

- Linux systems with systemd can now support having Qt log to journald, the systemd journal. By default logging of Qt interactive applications will be sent to the standard error stream but now there's journald logging support too.

- There's support for X Input 2 smooth-scrolling on Linux.

- QtNetwork now supports the SPDY v3.0 protocol.

- QtBluetooth is now available on Android.

- Performance and stability improvements.

- Improved printing support and it now depends upon CUPS 1.4 and newer.

- A new QtWebSocket module.

- Various other changes.