Release of Qbs 1.14 assembly tools, the development of which was continued by the community

Submitted by production of assembly tools Qbs 1.14. This is the first release since the Qt Company left the development of the project, prepared by the community interested in continuing the development of Qbs. To build Qbs, Qt is required among the dependencies, although Qbs itself is designed to organize the assembly of any projects. Qbs uses a simplified version of the QML language to define project build scripts, which allows you to define fairly flexible build rules that can connect external modules, use JavaScript functions, and create custom build rules.

The scripting language used in Qbs is adapted to automate the generation and parsing of build scripts by IDEs. In addition, Qbs does not generate makefiles, and itself, without intermediaries such as the make utility, controls the launch of compilers and linkers, optimizing the build process based on a detailed graph of all dependencies. The presence of initial data on the structure and dependencies in the project allows you to effectively parallelize the execution of operations in several threads. For large projects consisting of a large number of files and subdirectories, the performance of rebuilds using Qbs can outperform make by several times - the rebuild is almost instantaneous and does not make the developer spend time waiting.

Let us recall that a year ago the Qt Company was received decision to stop developing Qbs. 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. Development of Qbs has now continued as an independent project supported by the community and interested developers. The Qt Company infrastructure continues to be used for development. Support for Qbs 1.14.0 is built into Qt Creator 4.10.1, and the next release of Qbs 1.15 is expected at the same time as Qt Creator 4.11.

All innovations Qbs 1.14:

• Support for Visual Studio 2019 and clang-cl (an alternative Clang command line interface, option-compatible with the cl.exe compiler included in Visual Studio);
• Support for embedded development tools
  IAR, WEDGE и SDCC, which allows you to use Qbs for projects developed for several hardware platforms;

• Added configuration files and build scripts for the Travis CI continuous integration system, allowing you to build and test each set of patches for Qbs reviewed in Gerrit;
• A Debian-based Docker image has been completely redesigned, which can be used as a build and test environment;
• Support for older versions of Android NDK (‹19) has been discontinued.

Source: opennet.ru