Qt 5.7 released with Raspberry Pi 3 support

The Qt Company has released Qt 5.7 as the newest cross-platform application framework. The new version brings native support for Raspberry Pi 3 and uses some QML-based Quick Controls to enhance the user experience.

“I’m very happy to announce that Qt 5.7 is now available,” said Lars Knoll, CTO at the Qt Company, in a blog post. “It’s been only three months since we released Qt 5.6, so one might expect a rather small release with Qt 5.7. But apart from the usual bug fixes and performance improvements, we have managed to add a whole bunch of new things to this release,” Knoll added.

Qt has always been one of the popular dev tools as over one million developers worldwide are using its features to design multi-platform apps. But the new support for Raspberry Pi 3 is quite likely to increase its existing user base. The community for Raspberry Pi can leverage the new framework and kick-start their embedded development by just installing its SDK.

In addition to Raspberry Pi 3 support, the new Qt version is compatible with advanced hardware such as the NVIDIA Drive CX boards and i.MX7-based devices. Users working on Microsoft Windows can now also use the dev tool as a host platform to develop new offerings for embedded Linux.

Unlike the previous versions, Qt 5.7 supports a C++ 11 compliant compiler to offer developers more of the modern C++ language. It not only adds the functionality of the framework at the root level but also enhances the existing code base of the company with some new features.

“Starting with Qt 5.7, we will require a C++11 compliant compiler to build and use Qt. This allows us to use many of the new features in Qt itself, and renew our code base using features such as constexpr, move semantics, range-for and auto,” Knoll said.

The Qt Company has shifted its licensing from LGPL version 2.1 to LGPL version 3 and GPL version 3 for most of its frameworks and libraries. To promote community efforts, the Finland-based company has additionally open sourced some of its Qt add-ons and tools under GPL version 3.