Qt Has A Super Busy Year Ahead With A Lot Of Features Planned For 2018

Tuukka Turunen of The Qt Company has shared some of the company's plans for the Qt toolkit in 2018. There is a lot ahead for this open-source, cross-platform toolkit in 2018 with another long-term support release later this year, new Qt Python bindings, a safety-critical renderer and more.

If all of The Qt Company's plans for the year materialize, 2018 could easily be the most interesting year yet for this long-standing toolkit. Some of their 2018 action items include:

- The Qt 5.12 LTS release will happen in November as expected, assuming no delays. Qt 5.11 meanwhile is still on track for release by the end of May.

- Qt Creator should have releases in 2018 of Qt Creator 4.6 in March, Qt Creator 4.7 in July, and Qt Creator 4.8 in November.

- Qt 3D Studio 2.0 should be out in June with a new runtime based on Qt 3D. Qt 3D Studio 2.1 should come in September and Qt 3D Studio 2.2 in December.

- Qt Automotive Suite 2.0 is expected to be released soon.

- Qt Safe Renderer 1.0 is expected to be introduced soon as a renderer for safety-critical applications of Qt.

- One of the biggest focuses of 2018 is unifying Qt's 3D engines between the NVIDIA 3D engine and Qt 3D.

- Improve asset conditioning for Qt in 2018 with texture compression and packaging formats. Qt 5.11 will add support for the Khronos Texture KTX format.

- Improved Vulkan support is being worked on too.

- Qt Wayland should receive better graphics hardware support.

- Pointer Handlers for better gesture handling should be fully-supported for Qt 5.12.

- Qt Quick Controls 2 will be improved upon in Qt 5.11 and 5.12.

- They hope to release Qt for Python this year, officially supported Python bindings for Qt.

- Developers continue investigating Qt for WebAssembly for making use of the tool-kit within web-browsers.

The complete overview of Qt's plans for 2018 can be found via Qt.io.