Announcing wxWidgets 3.1.6 release

[Vadim Zeitlin]

April 04, 2022 -- The wxWidgets team is pleased to announce a new
release of our open source framework for the development of native
cross-platform applications in C++.

wxWidgets 3.1.6 is the latest release in the 3.1 development branch and
hopefully the last one before the next stable 3.2.0 release. It is now
available at

https://www.wxwidgets.org/downloads/

Compared to the stable 3.0.x series, this version brings too many
improvements and even more bug fixes to list all of them here, please
see the change log

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/v3.1.6/docs/changes.txt

for the incomplete list of the most important ones and here is the
maximally condensed summary of the changes compared to 3.0:

- Build system improvements: support for new compilers (up to MSVS 2022,
g++ 11, clang 13) with an even simpler way of using wxWidgets from
MSVS, with wxwidgets.props file, and OS versions as well as an
entirely new CMake build system.
- Support for native dark mode under macOS 10.14 Mojave and later and
support for macOS 11 and later on ARM hardware.
- New features: HTTPS and HTTP/2 support with wxWebRequest and friends;
support for freezing rows/columns in wxGrid; mouse gesture events
(GSoC 2017 project); non-integer font sizes and arbitrary font weights
in wxFont; fractional pen widths in wxGraphicsContext; arbitrary label
windows in wxStaticBox; markup in wxDataViewCtrl items text; better
support for high DPI monitors and per-monitor DPI, notably the
addition of wxBitmapBundle, and dynamic DPI changes support under MSW;
support for ZIP 64 files; LZMA compression; much improved
accessibility support under MSW; new Edge-based wxWebView
implementation.
- New classes: wxActivityIndicator, wxAddRemoveCtrl, wxAppProgressIndicator,
wxBitmapBundle, wxNativeWindow, wxPersistentComboBox,
wxPowerResourceBlocker, wxSecretStore, wxTempFFile and many new
features in the existing classes.
- New XRC handlers for all the new and some of the existing classes.
- Significant improvements to: wxBusyInfo, wxDataViewCtrl, wxDirDialog, wxGrid,
wxNotificationMessage, wxSpinCtrl, wxStaticBox, wxStyledTextCtrl,
wxUIActionSimulator.
- Improvements to compile-time safety with the possibility to disable dangerous
implicit conversions between wxString and "char*" strings.
- Latest versions of all bundled 3rd party libraries, including all the
security fixes and support for WebKit 2 and GStreamer 1.7 under Unix.
- Revamped OpenGL support better suited to modern OpenGL (3.2+).
- Further C++11 and later support improvements, wxWidgets can be built using
C++20 compilers.
- A lot of bug fixes, especially in wxGTK3 and wxOSX/Cocoa ports.
- New experimental wxQt port.


This release is a "development" one as it makes (very few)
incompatible API changes compared to 3.0 and does not guarantee the
ABI stability, unlike the 3.0.x series. It is not inherently more
buggy or less stable than the "stable" releases and you're encouraged
to use it, including in production. If you're already using 3.0, upgrading
shouldn't require any special effort, so please try it out.

We hope that you will enjoy using the new release!

Vadim Zeitlin, on behalf of wxWidgets development team.