The release of the Qbs 1.19 build tool has been published. This is the sixth release since the Qt Company ceased development of the project, prepared by the efforts of the community interested in continuing the development of Qbs. Qbs requires Qt as a dependency for its build process, although it is designed to organize the build of any projects. Qbs uses a simplified version of the QML language to define build scripts, allowing for fairly flexible build rules where external modules can be connected, JavaScript functions can be utilized, and arbitrary build rules can be created.
The scripting language used in Qbs is adapted for automating the generation and parsing of build scripts in integrated development environments. Furthermore, Qbs does not generate makefiles but controls the launch of compilers and linkers directly, optimizing the build process based on a detailed graph of all dependencies. Having original data about the project's structure and dependencies allows for efficiently parallelizing operations across multiple threads. For large projects consisting of a significant number of files and subdirectories, the performance of rebuilding using Qbs can surpass make by several times—rebuilds occur almost instantly and do not cause developers to waste time waiting.
It is worth reminding that in 2018, the Qt Company decided to stop the development of Qbs. Qbs was developed as a replacement for qmake, but ultimately it was decided to use CMake as the primary build system for Qt in the long term. The development of Qbs is now continued in the form of an independent project, supported by the community and interested developers. The development still utilizes the infrastructure of the Qt Company.
Key innovations in Qbs 1.19:
- A new codesign module has been implemented, providing tools for signing application packages and executable files with digital signatures when building for Apple, Android, and Windows platforms.
- Support for using multiple versions of the MSVC compiler included in a single installation of Visual Studio or across different versions of Windows SDK has been added. Qbs now creates a separate profile for each version of the compiler.
- Support for Motorola HCS12 architecture has been added to the GCC and IAR toolchains, while the SDCC (Small Device C Compiler) and IAR have added support for Motorola HCS08 architecture.
- Automatic detection of the presence of the Keil toolchain has been established.
- Support for Android NDK 22.1.7171670 has been added.
- Support for Xcode 12.5 has been added (QBS-1644).
- Compatibility with Qt 6.1 has been implemented.
Source: opennet.ru
