Qt 6.6 has been officially released, as promised.
Qt is a cross-platform application development framework that is widely used to create graphical user interfaces, embedded systems, mobile applications, etc. Qt 6 is the latest version of Qt, released in December 2022, bringing many new features and improvements, such as a more powerful QML language, a more flexible graphics architecture, and more efficient memory management.
Based on Qt 6.5, Qt 6.6 introduces some new modules and functions, and fixes some known problems and errors.
One of the most notable new modules is Qt Graphs (currently still in technology preview), which is a replacement for the Qt Data Visualization module and is used to create various types of two- and three-dimensional charts, such as line charts, bar charts, Pie charts, scatter plots, etc. Qt Graphs uses Qt Quick 3D for rendering and supports native graphics backends such as OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal and Direct3D. Qt Graphs will eventually provide most or all of the functionality provided by Qt Data Visualization.
Qt Quick also supports responsive layouts.
Another new feature worth noting is the Text To Speech module, which is used to convert text to speech and supports multiple languages and pronunciations. The Text To Speech module has been improved in Qt 6.6 Beta by adding support for Microsoft Speech API (SAPI) 5 on Windows platforms, improving speech quality and reliability.
In addition, Qt for Python now supports asyncioand is compatible with the AArch64 architecture, so it can be used on 64-bit embedded systems.
Other interesting new features in Qt 6.6:
- A more powerful Wayland synthesizer experience
- Supports Qt GUI Module for direct access to OpenType features of used fonts
- The QRhi family of classes for the Qt rendering hardware interface now has full documentation
- Qt Quick Shapes module adds experimental curve rendering backend
- Supports importing PLY files using Qt Quick 3D
- Initial rendering extension support for Qt Quick 3D
- Qt SQL adds Mimer SQL plug-in
- Improve Qt TextToSpeech