Qt has reached another important evolutionary milestone today. We are very proud to announce that Qt 4.8.0 has now been released. Many people have worked long and hard to deliver Qt 4.8.0. Today that hard work reaches final release maturity, and we are celebrating!
Featuring Qt Platform Abstraction, threaded OpenGL support, multithreaded HTTP and optimized file system access, Qt 4.8.0 can be downloaded as binary or source packages (Qt Download Page).
Content
Those of you that have been testing and using Qt 4.8 through its earlier stages will know the key benefits it brings. If you haven't been following it, here are some key features that are new in Qt 4.8.0:
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Qt Platform Abstraction (QPA)
QPA restructures the GUI stack to enable easier porting of Qt to different windowing systems and devices. More info on: Lighthouse has grown up now.
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Threaded OpenGL support
Enables those of us that are not OpenGL-ninjas to render OpenGL from more than one thread concurrently. More info on: Threaded OpenGL in 4.8.
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Multithreaded HTTP
HTTP requests are now handled in a separate thread by default. This should make application guis smoother, as networking will no longer use the main event loop.
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Optimized file system access
The file system stack received some heavy lifting under the hood. The result is better I/O performance, achieved by reducing the number of system calls performed for I/O and by better use of cached data, when available. The improvements in performance can be seen across all platforms.
Qt 4.8.0 ships with QtWebKit 2.2.1. More details of the major changes can be found in the Qt 4.8 beta blog post.
Downloads
The source and binary packages for Qt 4.8.0 can be downloaded from the Qt Download Page. The source code can also be found in the public repository, where the "v4.8.0" tag matches the released packages. Please note that the documentation has been moved to Qt Developer network, as part of moving Qt to the Qt Project.
Feedback
Thanks for all the feedback and contributions to Qt 4.8 so far. Further feedback can be provided in the Qt Bug Tracker.
Qt Project
We have started looking into moving Qt 4 to the Qt Project, which will make it simpler for you to contribute changes using Gerrit (the same infrastructure as used for Qt 5 already). This might take some time, but we are eager to see it happen.
Traditions
According to tradition the announcement of minor releases should contain a picture of the people who has made the release happen.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed. We are looking forward to seeing the great applications you will make.
