Release of Qbs build tool 1.14, continued development supported by the community

Introduced release of the build tool Qbs 1.14. This is the first release after the Qt Company's departure from the project's development, prepared by the community interested in continuing Qbs development. Qbs requires Qt as one of its dependencies, although it is designed to organize the build of any projects. Qbs uses a simplified version of QML to define build scripts, allowing the specification of quite flexible build rules, where external modules can be connected, JavaScript functions can be used, and custom 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.

Let's recall that a year ago, the Qt Company made the decision to discontinue Qbs development. Qbs was developed as a replacement for qmake, but ultimately it was decided to use CMake as the main 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 infrastructure of the Qt Company is still being used for development. Support for Qbs 1.14.0 is built into Qt Creator 4.10.1, and the next release, Qbs 1.15, is expected to coincide with Qt Creator 4.11.

Key innovations Qbs 1.14:

• Support for Visual Studio 2019 and clang-cl (an alternative command-line interface for Clang, option-compatible with the cl.exe compiler from Visual Studio);
• Support for development toolchains for embedded devices
  IAR, KEIL and SDCC, allowing the use of Qbs for projects developed for multiple hardware platforms;
• Configuration files and build scripts for the Travis CI continuous integration system have been added, enabling the compilation and testing of each patch set reviewed in Gerrit for Qbs;
• The Docker image based on Debian has been completely redesigned, which can be used as a build and testing environment;
• Support for old versions of Android NDK (‹19) has been discontinued.

Source: opennet.ru