Qt 5.5 Released

New submitter mx+b writes: The latest version of Qt, the cross platform GUI toolkit and development platform, is out for all major platforms. Highlights include better 3D, multimedia, and web support, as well as better support for the latest OS X and Windows releases (including Windows 10) and more Linux distributions.

Comments

Re:Why do they bother

[Gravis Zero]

QT is a huge stinking pile of bloatware. I eschew it.

You are right, QuickTime is bloatware. However, Qt is well written and you are given the option to build only what you need and which libraries it should use. The render engine is exceptionally flexible too, allowing it to leverage many different methods of rendering. Don't have X? no problem, add a runtime argument (-platform linuxfb) and your qt program will display using the linux framebuffer. Qt also builds for desktops (e.g. Linux, Windows) and embedded systems (e.g. Android, iOS) and is easy to cross-compile for your device of choice.

if you think GTK+ is slimmer, guess again and check your binaries.

Re:Modularity

[Kjella]

The very page you link to says:

Some might argue that there might arise a small problem with shipping 27M ICU libraries. If you don't need ICU (http://site.icu-project.org/) you have to recompile Qt with ./configure -without-icu.

What's ICU?

Here are a few highlights of the services provided by ICU:

Code Page Conversion: Convert text data to or from Unicode and nearly any other character set or encoding. ICU's conversion tables are based on charset data collected by IBM over the course of many decades, and is the most complete available anywhere.

Collation: Compare strings according to the conventions and standards of a particular language, region or country. ICU's collation is based on the Unicode Collation Algorithm plus locale-specific comparison rules from the Common Locale Data Repository, a comprehensive source for this type of data.

Formatting: Format numbers, dates, times and currency amounts according the conventions of a chosen locale. This includes translating month and day names into the selected language, choosing appropriate abbreviations, ordering fields correctly, etc. This data also comes from the Common Locale Data Repository.

Time Calculations: Multiple types of calendars are provided beyond the traditional Gregorian calendar. A thorough set of timezone calculation APIs are provided.

Unicode Support: ICU closely tracks the Unicode standard, providing easy access to all of the many Unicode character properties, Unicode Normalization, Case Folding and other fundamental operations as specified by the Unicode Standard.

Regular Expression: ICU's regular expressions fully support Unicode while providing very competitive performance.

Bidi: support for handling text containing a mixture of left to right (English) and right to left (Arabic or Hebrew) data.

Text Boundaries: Locate the positions of words, sentences, paragraphs within a range of text, or identify locations that would be suitable for line wrapping when displaying the text.

And much more. Refer to the ICU User Guide for details.

Not sure exactly how much Qt functionality you'd lose, but it's an optional dependency.