Qbs 1.15.0 released

We are pleased to announce version 1.15.0 of the Qbs build tool.

Qbs is a build tool designed for flexibility, speed and multi-platform development. It is particularly appreciated for its clean concept and easy-to-learn language. This can significantly reduce the effort an engineer has to spend on build automation, saving costs and time to market.

What's new

General Features

• The new session command offers a JSON-based API for interaction with other tools via stdin/stdout. This allows for proper Qbs support in IDEs that do not use Qt or even C++.

Language

• Probes on the project level are now evaluated before Profile items. That way a Qbs project can easily interface to package managers like Conan or vcpkg and resolve all build dependencies including compiler toolchains in a clean and platform-agnostic way. No further help is needed from the package manager as long as it can export meta data in a machine-readable format.
• A new timeout property in Command, JavaScriptCommand and AutotestRunner allows to identify and kill stuck commands. This is particularly useful when running Qbs in an automated environment.

C/C++ Support

• Xcode 11 is now properly supported.
• Clang in mingw mode is now supported on Windows.
• Support for msp430 on GCC, IAR and STM8, support for STM8 on IAR and SDCC has been added.
• A new IDE project generator for IAR Embedded Workbench has been implemented which supports ARM, AVR, 8051, MSP430, STM8 targets.
• A new IDE project generator for KEIL uVision v4 has been implemented which supports ARM and 8051 targets.

Infrastructure

• When building Qbs, Qt and compiler run-time libraries can now be bundled on Linux, macOS and Windows. This makes it easier to package and (re-)distribute Qbs.

Try it

Qbs is available for download on the download page. Please post issues in our bug tracker. We have recently started to use Discord in addition to the existing IRC channel #qbs on chat.freenode.net. Feel free to join. You can use our mailing list for questions and discussions. The documentation and wiki are also good places to get started.

Qbs is also available on various packaging systems (Chocolatey, MacPorts, Homebrew) and via the native package management system on a number of Linux distributions including but not limited to Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and ArchLinux.

Qbs 1.15.0 is also included in Qt Creator 4.11.0, which was released recently.

Contribute

If you are a happy user of Qbs, please tell others about it. But maybe you would like to contribute something. Everything that makes Qbs better is highly appreciated. Contributions may consist of reporting bugs or fixing them right away. But also new features are very welcome. Your patches will be automatically sanity-checked, built and verified on Linux, macOS and Windows by our CI bot. Get started with instructions in the Qbs Wiki.

A big thanks to everybody who made the 1.15.0 release happen:

• Alberto Mardegan
• Christian Kandeler
• Denis Shienkov
• Ivan Komissarov
• Jochen Ulrich
• Joerg Bornemann
• Richard Weickelt
• Riitta Leena Miettinen