Qt 6.0 Might Be Coming After Qt 5.14, Could Depend Upon C++17

Since last year there has been more talk and early planning around the eventual Qt 6.0 milestone. It's looking now like Qt 6.0 might happen after Qt 5.14, or likely in 2020.

Last year there were developer discussions about starting Qt6 work after Qt 5.11, which was released at the end of May. Previous discussions of Qt6 have entailed QIODevice support, a Qt Quick scene graph, improved accessibility, and a Vulkan back-end for Qt Quick.

Taking place this week was the 2018 Qt Contributors' Summit where Qt6 discussions again took place. The latest is that the Qt 6.0 release will still be "several releases out, maybe after Qt 5.14." If sticking to six month releases and Qt 5.12 already scheduled for release in November, and then Qt 5.13/5.14 next year, that would position the Qt 6.0 release to happen in 2020.

One of the Qt6 items discussed at this week's summit was over the C++ version and it appears C++17 will make the most sense for Qt6 with C++20 being perhaps too aggressive.

Other possible Qt 6 features being discussed are reduced memory consumption, increased performance, keeping APIs as easy to use as possible, and backwards source compatibility as much as possible. Maintaining as much source compatibility as possible with Qt 5.12+ will be of big benefit to the prompt adoption of Qt 6.0.

A brief recap of this week's Qt Contributors' Summit 2018 can be found on qt.io.