Release candidate lands for Qt 5.0

Lars Knoll, Qt Chief architect at Digia, has announced that a release candidate for Qt 5.0 is now available and that the company hopes to release the new version of the C++ framework for cross platform application development within a week. Knoll reports "tremendous progress" in the four weeks since the release of the second beta of Qt, with hundreds of bugs fixed. He also pointed to the newly restructured documentation which should make switching to the new release easier.

The project had prepared for this final stretch by reorganising its repositories just over a week ago. For Qt developers, Knoll notes that there have been some additional API changes between the last beta and the release candidate – these are documented in the change log and known bugs are listed on the known issues page. Barring any major issues arising during final testing, Knoll expects the final release to be in a week's time. If that doesn't happen, he says people should expect another release candidate. The new features in Qt 5.0 are listed on the project's wiki and include JSON support in the core, new OpenGL classes, the new QML engine powered by Google's V8 JavaScript engine, the Qt Quick canvas and scenegraph, and the Qt Location geolocation API.

The Qt 5.0 release candidate is available to download as libraries for Windows, 32- and 64-bit Linux, and Mac OS X, or as source code. The LGPL licensed code is, of course, also available from the Qt Project's repository.

(djwm)