Qt developers present release candidate in preparation for v5.13

Qt developers present release candidate in preparation for v5.13

C++ library for cross-platform applications Qt is about to hit v5.13 next week – the release candidate is now available and gives you a final chance to weigh in or just take a peek at what’s to come.

Amongst other things Qt has become a bit more secure, since the network module for example now supports the TLS certificate status request extension (OSCP stapling) and secure channels for SSL sockets under Windows. Something similar goes for the Qt for Automation collection, which gets a couple of secure client APIs and DTLS support.

Most Qt enhancements can be found in the Multimedia module, which now sports HTTP headers and audio roles for Android, QT_PA_CHANNEL_MAP for QAudioOutput and PulseAudio, as well as QT_MULTIMEDIA_PREFERRED_PLUGINS to specify preferred plugins. Thanks to a few changes Qt Multimedia is also able to use GStreamer on Windows and macOS and there’s a way to have gapless playback in QML VideoOutput using flushMode.

The core has also gotten some love and comes with a new configure switch -coverage in its Clang component, which is meant to help with fuzzing.

With v5.13, Qt 3D is able to import and export OpenCL texture handles, offer priority based picking, and framegraph nodes for fence objects. Those working with the Location module might be interested to learn that it can now be more easily used with GeoJson via import and export functions. The developers also added support for GeoPolygones with holes, if your data is a bit more on the sparse side for example.

Meanwhile the project’s modeling language QML is now able to generate function tables on 64bit Windows, which is helpful if you want to unwind the stack. It is also meant to work better with enums declared in C++ and optimises JavaScript “null” as binding value at compile time.

More details can be found in the Qt wiki. Developers using Qt with Android should be advised that Android 5.0 (API level 21) is now the minimum supported version. Those into WebAssembly should take a look at the library as well, since the platform is now supported.