Qbs 2.0 released

The Qbs build tool version 2.0.0 is available.

Qbs is a community-driven language-agnostic build automation system. It is fast and offers an easy-to-learn language based upon QML. 

What's new

If this release looks a bit short on features, that's because a lot of work was spent on one rather daunting task, namely:

New JavaScript backend

When the deprecation of QtScript was announced for Qt 6, we quickly started  looking for a light-weight replacement for our JavaScript backend, as the prospect of maintaining QtScript with its complex JavaScriptCore dependency ourselves did not seem particularly appealing. However, none of the candidates offered an API to intercept property accesses, which we absolutely require for performance reasons. That changed when QuickJS came along, so we could finally start porting, and just a couple of days weeks months later we had a functional new backend.

From a user's point of view, there should not be any noticeable changes; in particular, the performance appears to be about the same. However, QtScript was rather forgiving about accepting undefined values in contexts where it didn't have to, so the new implementation might uncover some glitches in your projects.

As a final point, the magnitude of this change gave us an excuse to bump the major version number, so we did.

Removal of qmake project files

With our cmake project files having been feature complete for a while now (not to mention the qbs ones), the qmake project files became mostly a maintenance burden and were removed.

What's kinda new

Some more relevant changes since our last blog post:

• The new Host extension offers information about the host system. Most of its functions used to be properties of the qbs module, but did not belong there.
• The new Sanitizers.address module provides ASAN support for projects in a convenient manner.
• The FileInfo extension has an executableSuffix function now.
• ModuleProvider items now support Probes.
• We added support for the OpenWatcom toolchain.
• Android multi-arch packages are supported again wth Qt >= 6.3.

What's next

While it's still a couple of months away, we can already say that the 2.1 release will see a long-overdue rewrite of our project resolving code. If you think that's irrelevant to you as a user, you might be surprised by the performance implications. More details in the next blog post.

Try it

Qbs is available for download on the download page. 

Please report issues in our bug tracker.

Join our Discord server for live discussions.

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 from a number of package repositories (Chocolatey, MacPorts, and Homebrew), and is updated on each release by the Qbs development team. It can also be installed through the native package management system on a number of Linux distributions. Please find a complete overview on repology.org.

Qbs 2.0.0 is also included in Qt Creator 10.0.0.

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.
Thanks to everybody who made the 2.0 release happen:

• Christian Kandeler
• Ivan Komissarov
• Orgad Shaneh
• Pino Toscano