Qt Roadmap for 2019

It has been a great start into 2019! We recently released Qt 5.12 which comes with multiple performance improvements and thousands of bug fixes– it’s a great release to base your work upon. But we have more in the works: Python language bindings, tools for developers and designers, industry-specific offering, and a lot more. Indeed, 2019 looks to be another great year for Qt users!

It’s around this time of the year I sit down to write a blog post about our plans and roadmap for the coming year. Typically, some of the items have already been cooking for a while, but some are still plans in the making. If you want to look into the previous roadmap blog posts, here are the ones I wrote for 2016, 2017 and 2018. There is always more to tell than what would reasonably fit in a blog post, but I’ll try to talk about the most interesting items.

Before diving any further into the new items planned for 2019, I would like to thank each and every Qt developer for their contribution. We have a great ecosystem with many contributors who have provided multiple extremely valuable contributions throughout the years and continue to shape Qt in the future, too. In addition to those contributing code, we also have many active people in the Qt Project forums, on mailing lists, as well as reviewing code and testing the Qt development releases.

The Baseline: Qt 5.12 LTS

A lot of our efforts in 2019 will go into further improving Qt 5.12 LTS via multiple patch releases providing error corrections and performance improvements. Qt 5.12 LTS is the third long-term supported Qt 5 release and as such already a great baseline for developing applications. In Qt 5.12.0 we have fixed over 5000 bugs since Qt 5.6.3 and over 2000 since Qt 5.9.7. As all fixes currently go to Qt 5.12 LTS we take further steps ahead of the earlier LTS releases with each Qt 5.12 LTS patch release. In addition to fixing bugs and developing new features, we have put a lot of effort into improving performance and resource consumption of Qt applications – especially those using Qt Quick and Qt 3D Studio. Qt 5.12 LTS added several new features too, and contains all the cool features of earlier Qt 5.11 and Qt 5.10 releases since the previous LTS release of Qt.

With Qt 5.6 LTS support ending in March 2019 and Qt 5.9 LTS being in the Strict mode (receiving only the most important fixes) we advise migrating to Qt 5.12 LTS. Not only will your Qt application run faster and better thanks to the bug fixes and performance improvements, but you can also profit from the many new features and optimizations Qt 5.12 LTS comes with.

So, the baseline is solid, but 2019 is not going to be merely about bug fixes and polish - we have also many cool new things cooking. Read on for a brief overview of what you can expect to be released during 2019.

Python, WebAssembly and other new goodies

Qt now fully supports Python with Qt 5.12 LTS. A lot of work has been done to get to this point, and we are really pleased to put all of Qt’s functionality at the fingertips of the growing community of Python developers. The work continues throughout 2019 with improvements and new features. In addition to constantly improving the Python bindings and supporting all the new Qt versions and patch releases, we have some great new features planned for 2019.

One highly requested new feature is integration with commonly used Python 3^rdparty modules like numpy, pytorch, pandas and matplotlib. Out of these, we expect to provide at least integration to numpy during 2019, possibly some others as well. Easier deployment of Qt for Python applications is another commonly requested item and we aim to provide a better solution in 2019. Other major items include improved integration of QML as well as tooling improvements, especially making Qt Creator an awesome IDE also for Python developers.

Another really cool new item is Qt for WebAssembly. It has so far been a technology preview but will become a fully supported platform with Qt 5.13. It has gained a lot more functionality, as well as performance and stability improvements since the first preview release. We continue to improve functionality and fix bugs as more users adopt Qt for WebAssembly and report issues.

2019 will bring a lot of important features and quality-of-life improvements to Qt for WebAssembly users. Windows will be supported as a development host, in addition to Mac and Linux which were already available. We also start providing binary packages of Qt for WebAssembly, just like we do for most of the other supported platforms. New features coming in 2019 include access to local file systems (with the restrictions imposed by the browser sandbox), threading support on browsers where this is enabled, support for system clipboard, and addressing multiple canvases in the browser document. We are also working to enable debugging and to improve linking times for applications to accelerate development.

With Qt 5.13 we are adding a technology preview of Qt Lottie, a player for Bodymovin animations. Bodymovin is a plugin to Adobe After Effects tool and there are multiple different player implementations on different platforms – and now a cross-platform one created with Qt. The new player allows easy inclusion and use of these animations in a Qt Quick application. Qt Lottie makes it possible to control the pre-created animation (reverse/start/pause/stop/autoplay etc) and even change the animation source dynamically. From the beginning, we have focused on performance aspects to enable Qt Lottie to be used on embedded devices in addition to the typical targets of these animations like web, desktop and mobile platforms.

While the functionality of Qt Widgets is already very comprehensive, we are also planning to add new widgets during 2019. Our current thinking is that a circular progress bar and a switch widget would be good additions. One of them or both should arrive at a computer near you with the Qt 5.14 release. Other than that, we are continuously working to improve Qt Widgets further by fixing bugs and making small improvements where needed.

Tools for Developers: Qt Creator and new Qt Lite Tooling

In the past releases of Qt Creator, we have done a lot of work behind the scenes to switch to the clang code model. Now that this is done, we have already enjoyed some benefits such as clang-tidy and clazy. During 2019 we plan on bringing better diagnostics management as well as improved performance to the Qt Creator IDE. One development item is to use a symbol database (indexdb) to have a fast, binary representation of the project. This is expected to improve performance a lot compared to parsing the files continuously. We are also improving the Language Server Protocol support and leveraging it to support more programming languages with Qt Creator.

The new framework items need good tools and thus we are continuously improving the Python support of Qt Creator to allow great developer experience. Currently just a research item, we might enable the ability to extend Qt Creator via Python in the future. We will update you on where this will lead us towards the latter part of 2019. We are also working to provide out-of-the-box support of Qt for WebAssembly.

CMake has been supported by Qt Creator for quite a while. During 2019, we aim to improve the support further and make it easier to start new projects with CMake. We plan to create a CMake based build system for Qt Creator and to better support embedded development with CMake using Qt Creator.

Qt Quick Designer, which is part of Qt Creator, will receive new functionality initially developed for Qt Design Studio. While Qt Design Studio is indented for designers, not directly as a development tool, it does share a lot of parts with the Qt Creator IDE. Thus, we can bring many of the usability and ergonomics improvements into Qt Creator’s Qt Quick Designer view. One major new feature coming soon to Qt Creator is the capability to create Qt Quick animations using the new timeline editor in Qt Quick Designer.

Qt for Device Creation users will get a major improvement to the Qt Lite configuration tool during 2019. With the new version we are improving the usability of the tool and further extending the configurability of Qt. In addition, we are creating some pre-defined configurations to start from, expected to make it easier to benefit from the tool. One major usability improvement coming with the new version of the Qt Lite configuration tool is capability to directly make the whole configuration with the visual tool, without running separate configure steps.

Tools for Designers: Qt Design Studio and Qt 3D Studio

One of the biggest investments of 2019 will go into the design tooling for both 2D and 3D user interfaces, as well as into further improving the Qt 3D Studio runtime. The long-term goal is to unify the 2D and 3D design tools into one application, of course still having specialized capabilities for 2D and 3D UI. The first steps towards unification are becoming visible during 2019 with multiple shared components, improved interoperability and unified installation of the tools.

Let’s first look into Qt Design Studio, the tool for developing Qt Quick UIs. We published the first release in October 2018. The recently released Qt Design Studio 1.1 provides a lot of polish to the rough edges of the first release, adds merge support for the Photoshop import functionality, as well as brings multiple improvements to the examples and documentation. Also Linux packages are now available in addition to Mac and Windows.

During 2019 we will add many important features to Qt Design Studio, for example support for additional graphics design tools such as Sketch, a new easing curve editor and a new property inspector, both shared with Qt 3D Studio as well. We are also improving multi-monitor support, providing project workspace with dockable windows and finetuning the ergonomics and usability of the application. We aim to make also an open-source release of Qt Design Studio, which is currently only available for commercial license holders.

Qt 3D Studio is getting a major boost in runtime performance with the 2.3 version in March and 2.4 in June 2019. The renewed renderer and animation system as well as support for asset conditioning provide improved performance, significantly reduced CPU load, greatly reduced loading times of the 3D content, as well as lower memory consumption. Throughout 2019, we are making further improvements, allowing complex real-time 3D applications to run well even on mid-tier hardware. For the low-end 3D hardware we recommend leveraging Qt Quick as much as possible and using real-time 3D only for the parts that really need it.

Some of the most interesting new features of Qt 3D Studio coming in 2019 include support for stereoscopic rendering, completely renewed text rendering, distance fields for text, custom vertex shaders and support for precompiled shaders. Qt 3D Studio will also benefit from the new easing curve editor and property inspector, shared with Qt Design Studio. Stereoscopic rendering allows addressing AR/VR use cases easier than before with support for the most common stereoscopic rendering modes. Text rendering of Qt 3D Studio will receive a complete overhaul to be on par with the excellent capabilities Qt Quick offers for text.

With Qt 3D Studio we are also looking into providing an improved integration with content creation tools, such as Autodesk Maya. In addition to tool specific integrations, we aim to improve the already impressive list of supported input formats with new ones such as glTF 2.0 and possibly other new formats during 2019.

Automation, Automotive and other industries

During 2019 we are further developing our offering for safety critical systems. The functional safety certified Qt Safe Renderer will gain the capability to render dynamic text as well as support for large bitmaps. These will allow an even easier creation of complete safety-critical UIs using the Qt Safe Renderer. Furthermore, we are looking into supporting a wider array of hardware as well as possibly running on the simpler real-time operating systems typically available for microcontrollers.

Our offering for Automation and Automotive industries will get some important new features as well. For Automation, we are adding support for the CoAP protocol, first as a technology preview and later as fully supported. In addition, Qt OPCUA becomes fully supported with Qt 5.13 (with some of the new APIs such as QML API still TP) and other automation protocols get a few new features. We also plan to look into Qt OPCUA server implementation, allowing seamless Qt experience also when there is a need to create edge gateway applications.

Qt Automotive Suite will continue to focus on HMI development productivity. This year we aim to improve its capabilities of working with 3^rd party service integration and digital assistants, as well as inter-application operation via a new intent API. Through collaboration with Luxoft and KDAB, we will be looking at deep Qt Wayland support with hypervisor composition, and we will work on extending additional out-of-process backends for most automotive use cases For instance separating the UI and vehicle data by leveraging Qt IVI. In addition, we will work on adding useful components such as UI analytics and cursor control. We also continue to address multi-domain use cases by further improving Qt Remote Objects (fully supported with Qt 5.12 LTS) and by improving the graphics sharing functionality.

Work on addressing constantly lower performance (and cheaper price point) hardware continues throughout 2019. Qt is already running on multiple different Cortex-M4 and Cortex-M7 based microcontrollers and widely supported on various low-end ARMv7 and ARMv8 hardware boards. During 2019, we aim to address additional microcontrollers as well as different low-end real-time operating systems for microcontrollers. We are also thinking how to achieve a great developer experience with Qt for microcontrollers. Our long-term goal is to allow development with Qt for microcontrollers to be as easy as any other platform.

Many of the same optimizations and configurability that enables to address the microcontrollers can also be leveraged with the low-end application processors. Qt offers features and functionality not commonly available in the simple frameworks typically used in the low-end devices. With the versatile configuration system, it is possible to choose the needed functionality and leave out the functionality which the application does not require. This allows Qt to fit into a much smaller memory footprint and utilize less system resources than before.

Get Involved

If you want to learn more about upcoming things for Qt, please stay tuned for new blog posts and webinars about the upcoming features, contact our sales teams or join the discussion in the Qt mailing lists and developer forums. We are always delighted to see new contributors in the Qt Project as well as feedback to the pre-releases of Qt via bugreports.