The Qt Company has extended its coverage by releasing Qt 5.7 as the newest cross-platform application framework. The new version brings native support for Raspberry Pi 3 model and uses some QML-based Quick Controls to enhance user experience.
“I’m very happy to announce that Qt 5.7 is now available,” said Lars Knoll, CTO at the Qt Company, in a blog post. “It’s been only three months since we released Qt 5.6, so one might expect a rather small release with Qt 5.7. But apart from the usual bug fixes and performance improvements, we have managed to add a whole bunch of new things to this release.”
Qt was already one of the popular dev tools as over one million developers worldwide are so far utilising its features to design multi-platform apps. But the new support for Raspberry Pi 3 is quite likely to uplift its existing user base.
The community for Raspberry Pi can leverage the new framework and kick-start their embedded development by just installing its SDK.
New hardware compatibility
In addition to the Raspberry Pi 3 support, the new Qt version is compatible with advanced hardware such as the NVIDIA Drive CX boards and i.MX7-based devices. Users on Microsoft’s Windows can now also use the dev tool as a host platform to develop new offerings for embedded Linux.
Unlike the previous versions, Qt 5.7 supports C++ 11 compliant compiler to deliver developers more of the modern C++ language. It not just adds the functionality of the framework on the root level but also renew the existing codebase of the company with some new features.
“Starting with Qt 5.7, we will require a C++11 compliant compiler to build and use Qt. This allows us to use many of the new features in Qt itself, and renew our codebase using features such as constexpr, move semantics, range-for and auto,” Knoll said.
Change in existing licensing to raise Free Software movement
The Qt Company has shifted its licensing from LGPL version 2.1 to LGPL version 3 and GPL version 3 for most of its frameworks and libraries. To uplift community efforts, the Finland-based company has additionally open sourced some of its formerly closed Qt add-ons and tools under GPL version 3.
