Qt 6.0 Alpha Released

Even with the tumultuous year due to the coronavirus pandemic, The Qt Company is still on track for delivering the Qt 6.0 toolkit release before year's end.

Qt 6.0 Alpha was released today which is coming about one month behind schedule for their original release plan. But to get closer to releasing on target around the start of December, they do have plans for delivering the Qt 6.0 Beta around mid-October rather than waiting three weeks that was part of their original plan.

Originally Qt 6.0 aimed to ship on 1 December but that is now more difficult given their alpha delay but at the moment it's still looking like they will ship in December unless they run into issues with the later beta versions coming out timely or the release candidate. The delay in Qt 6.0 Alpha was due to bugs.

Qt 6.0 is bringing various host/target changes, drops Qt Script, temporarily removes Qt Multimedia/Bluetooth/Virtual-Keyboard modules until later Qt6 releases, a major overhaul to their graphics architecture to better support Vulkan and other modern graphics APIs, 3D improvements, next-generation QML, various tooling improvements, and more.

But going from Qt5 to Qt6 is much less breakage and changes compared to the prior Qt4 to Qt5 transition. Qt 6 adoption also likely won't pick up until well into 2021 or even 2022 with the first long-term support release not being until Qt 6.2 LTS in late 2021 and several modules not being ported for Qt 6.0.

Qt 6.0 Alpha details can be found via the Qt.io blog.