Today, the KDevelop team is proud to announce the final release of KDevelop 4.7.0. It is, again, a huge step forwards compared to the last release in terms of stability, performance and polishedness. This release is special, as it marks the end of the KDE4 era for us. As such, KDevelop 4.7.0 comes with a long-term stability guarantee. We will continue to improve it over the coming years, but will refrain from adding new features. For that, we have the upcoming KDevelop 5, based on KDE frameworks 5 and Qt 5, which our team is currently busy working on. See below for more on that topic.

Important KDevelop 4.7.0 Changes

This new release of KDevelop comes with many important changes that should ensure it will stay usable for the foreseeable future. The CMake support was improved and extended to ensure that all idioms needed for KF5 development are available. The unit test support UI was polished and several bugs fixed. In the same direction, some noteworthy issues with the QtHelp integration were addressed. KDevelop's PHP language support now handles namespaces better and can understand traits aliases. Furthermore, some first fruits of the Google summer of code projects are included in this release. These changes pave the path toward better support for cross compile toolchains. Feature-wise, KDevelop now officially supports the Bazaar (bzr) version control system. On the performance front, it was possible to greatly reduce the memory footprint when loading large projects with several thousand files in KDevelop. Additionally, the startup should now be much faster.

As always, many thanks to the various contributors that made this release possible!



KDevelop 4.7.0

Download KDevelop 4.7.0

The packagers of various distributions have already updated their version of KDevelop to the latest and greatest. If you want to look at the sources or compile it yourself, you can find the release tarballs on the KDE mirrors:

md5 checksums

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sha1 checksum

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sha256 checksums

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The Future of KDevelop 5

The development branches of the various KDevelop related projects are currently being ported to KDE frameworks 5 and Qt 5. Already, this reached a very usable state. Some plugins are still missing, but the team is actively working on filling the gaps. It is good to see how quick this transition is taking place, and we are confident to release a first KDevelop 5 version next year.



A screenshot of the current KDevelop 5 development version running on Plasma 5 with the new Breeze theme.

We are not planning to rewrite our core architecture, considering how well it works for us in KDevelop 4. There are, however, other big changes planned. First and foremost we are in the process of writing a language plugin based on LLVM/Clang. Not only does this give us an excellent C++ language support, it also comes with support for C and Objective-C languages for free. Even better, it allows us to throw away thousands of lines of code of our current C++ language plugin, which is a maintenance burden and hard to extend. The KDevelop team is very excited to see this happening and eagerly awaiting the day where the Clang language plugin is ready for prime-time.



C++ language support based on Clang providing code completion on the usage of `std::vector`.

Similarly, we are in the process of extending CMake upstream to get more information out of it directly. This enables us to replace our custom implementation of the CMake language in KDevelop with the real deal, which promises perfect support for all CMake features and greatly decreases the maintenance burden on our side.

Combined, we hope this brings us to a state, where the KDevelop team can work on improving the IDE and start innovating more rather than playing catch-up with the rapid progress in both the C++ language as well as CMake. The time gained will be put into finalizing the multitude of proof-of-concept plugins that so far never saw a release. Noteworthy in this regard are plugins that add support for the QML, JavaScript, CSS and Go languages. Additionally a tighter integration with QMake, Valgrind and other tools can be added.

Furthermore we are happy to see the improvements of Qt 5 in KDevelop, which lead, among others, to better performance in many places. And, combined with KDE frameworks 5, it finally becomes much simpler to get KDevelop up and running on Windows and Mac OS X. It is great to see contributions there and hope that more people start to use it. KDevelop 5 promises to become the first true cross-platform release of our IDE.



A preview of KDevelop 5 running on Windows

Help and Contribute

If you are interested in shaping the future of KDevelop, please get in touch with us and start contributing. We, for one, welcome our new frameworks overlords!