What's New in Qt 5.11

New Features in Qt 5.11

Qt Core Module

  • Added QIODevice::NewOnly and QIODevice::ExistingOnly OpenMode flags. When used with QFile, NewOnly instructs open() to (atomically) return false if the file to open exists. ExistingOnly instructs open() to (atomically) return false if the file does not exist.
  • QFloat16 now has two methods for bulk conversion between float16 and float, using hardware SIMD acceleration if available at runtime.
  • QVarLengthArray now has rvalue reference versions of prepend and insert, and can hold movable-only datatypes such as std::unique_ptr.
  • QVector now has rvalue reference versions of prepend and insert.
  • QUuid toString() and toByteArray() now take a parameter specifying the generated format.
  • Updated Unicode support in QString, QChar, and QTextBoundaryFinder to be compatible with Unicode 10.

Qt Network Module

  • ALPN (via Secure Transport) and thus HTTP/2 negotiation are now supported on iOS (starting from version 11).
  • QNetworkRequest now has the Http2DirectAttribute to start a connection in HTTP/2 without first negotiating.

Qt QML Module

  • The compiler pipeline is rewritten. We now directly generate byte code from the AST, and store that as our intermediate representation.
  • Optimized handling of JS calls, bringing large improvements especially when calling small functions.
  • Newly written byte code interpreter brings significant performance improvements, at 80-90% of the JIT in Qt 5.10.
  • .qmlc files are now fully platform-independent and store byte code instead of assembly.
  • New hotspot JIT that generates optimized assembly for byte code that gets repeatedly executed.
  • CONFIG += qtquickcompiler now also works in the open source version, by embedding the generated byte code at compile time.

Qt Quick Module

  • Expanded support for loading compressed textures in Image element. Now supports both .ktx and .pkm container file formats.

Qt Quick Controls 2 Module

  • AbstractButton
  • ButtonGroup
    • Added a checkState property. It indicates the combined check state of the entire group.
  • CheckBox and CheckDelegate
    • No longer force tristate to true when setting checkState to Qt.PartiallyChecked. This allows presenting a partially checked state without being interactively tri-state.
    • No longer consider partially checked as checked. This fixes check state cycling for a non-tri-state checkbox so that it goes from partially checked to fully checked state.
    • Made it possible to implement nextCheckState() in QML.
  • ScrollBar and ScrollIndicator
    • Added minimumSize, visualSize, and visualPosition properties.
  • SpinBox
    • Added a displayText property to allow styles to create a light binding to display the textual value instead of having to call the textFromValue() JS-function.

Qt 3D Module

  • Scrub through animations with the normalizedTime property of QAbstractClipAnimator.
  • Issue arbitrary ray casts in world space or screen space.
  • Improved SIMD support.

Qt Location Module

  • New Qt.labs.location plugin containing experimental QML types.

Qt WebEngine Module

  • Updated to Chromium 65.
  • Embedded DevTools without using a port and separate browser.
  • Installable cookie filter.
  • Quota permissions.

QDoc Documentation Generator

  • QDoc now uses libclang for parsing C/C++ code.

Qt Designer Tool

  • Added support for ID-based translations.

Qt GUI Module

  • On Windows Desktop, the accessibility support was updated and vastly improved. The implementation is now based on Microsoft UI Automation (it was formerly based on Microsoft Active Accessibility).
  • The widgets themes available on Windows Desktop were updated to better support High-DPI displays, including fixes for several rendering issues, providing improved appearance and functionality.
  • Linux Printing now supports more CUPS options with the advanced tab in QPrintPropertiesDialog, allowing many additional settings (amongst them arbitrary page ranges).
  • Updated the Unicode bidirectional text algorithm to be compliant with Unicode 10.

Qt Widgets Module

  • Added quick text selection by mouse to QLineEdit.

Qt Serial Bus Module

  • Added J2534 Pass-Thru CAN plugin for communication between a computer and a vehicle.
  • Added description, serial number and channel to QCanBusDeviceInfo, as far as supported by the various plugins.
  • Introduced categorized logging to the CAN bus module which can be enabled by the "qt.canbus" and "qt.canbus.plugins.<pluginname>" filters.
  • QCanBusFrame::isValid() now checks for invalid CAN FD payload lengths. E.g. 24 is a valid CAN FD payload length, but 28 is not.

Qt Bluetooth Module

  • Ported Bluetooth Low Energy Central role implementation to BlueZ's DBus LE API (minimum version to enable is BlueZ 5.42).

New Modules

No new modules were added in this version.

Platform Changes

  • MSVC2013 support removed from the code base.
  • Qt WebEngine now requires MSVC 2017 on Windows.
  • QNX 6.6 no longer supported (note: QNX 7 remains fully supported).
  • macOS 10.10 no longer supported.
  • Improved Accessibility support on Win32 by adopting the Windows UI Automation framework.
  • XCB: Support for missing 'dead keys' such as dasia and diaeresis.
  • eglfs
    • Added support for framebuffer formats other than XRGB8888 (RGB565, ARGB8888).
    • Added experimental screen cloning support (by scanning out the same framebuffer on multiple displays).
    • Added support for operating with DRM render nodes (/dev/dri/renderDnn) in a headless mode transparent to applications.
    • Added a makespec for Renesas R-Car M3.
    • Added experimental backend for compositing Qt content with other hardware layers via VSP2 on Renesas devices.

Technology Preview Modules

  • Qt Remote Objects (TP3) - A module that allows you to easily share QObject interfaces (Signals/Slots/Properties) between processes or devices.
  • Qt WebGL Streaming Plugin (TP2) - Stream applications to browsers over the network.

Deprecated Modules

The following modules are part of the Qt 5.11 release, but are deprecated and considered for removal in subsequent releases of Qt:

  • Qt Script
  • Qt Quick Controls 1

List of API Changes

The pages below contain a list of API changes in Qt 5.11:

Additions to Other Qt 5 Releases

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