Qt 5.15 Feature Development Is Over For This Last Step Of The Qt5 Series

Just as scheduled, earlier this month the feature freeze went into effect for Qt 5.15 as the last major step for Qt5 before seeing Qt 6.0 hopefully arrive towards the end of the year.

The Qt 5.15 Alpha release is expected to come in the days ahead but was delayed due to the late merging of new HorizontalHeaderView and VerticalHeaderView controls for tables in Qt Quick, which landed today. Still to happen on the Qt 5.15 branch before the beta is also more deprecations of functionality working to be removed or changed with Qt6.

Among the changes to find with Qt 5.15 include better profiling support within Qt 3D, the OpenGL renderer now being isolated to a plug-in, support for the nullish coalescing operator in QML, QDoc can now generate DocBook format, and various other changes.

Qt 5.15 isn't expected to be a particularly big feature release with The Qt Company and other contributors being rather preoccupied on plotting Qt 6.

The Qt 5.15 beta releases will ideally begin at the end of February while the initial stable release of Qt 5.15 is expected around mid-May. If all goes well, we could potentially see Qt 6.0 releasing around November barring any significant delays to allow more time for this evolutionary upgrade over Qt5. Qt 6.0 is working on significant changes to its graphics pipeline, big upgrades to QML, improved C++ APIs, better language support, and other evolutionary upgrades with focusing on minimizing breakage for a relatively smooth upgrade path for Qt5 code-bases.