VTK 8.0.0-rc1 ready for testing

The VTK maintenance team is happy to announce that VTK 8.0 has entered the release candidate stage!

You can find the source, data and documentation tarballs here:

http://www.vtk.org/download/#candidate

Take a look at the VTK wiki for a complete list of API changes in v8.0.0 over the previous version.

Please try this version of VTK, and report any issues to the VTK mailing list or the bug tracker so that we can try to address them before the VTK 8.0.0 final. Kindly set the 8.0 milestone on the issues and merge requests to ensure that they are tracked during the remainder of the 8.0 release process. Further, please base / rebase all 8.0 target branches off of the v8.0.0.rc1 tag to ensure minimal merge conflicts with the release branch.

The official release notes will be available when VTK 8.0.0 final is released in the next few weeks. In the meantime, here is a preview of the significant differences over VTK 7.1.0:

• VTK now allows use of some C++11 features and compiler optimizations. Take a look at the VTK Software Process document to see all the VTK C++11 features. This also means, beginning version 8.0.0, VTK requires a C++11 capable compiler to compile.
• VTK-m, a toolkit providing specialized algorithms and data processing features for modern multi-threaded processors and HPC systems has been integrated with VTK.

There are many other improvements and bug fixes across the code-base.

We hope you enjoy this release of VTK!

As always, contact Kitware and the mailing lists for assistance.