GNOME's GTK+ Had A Booming 2014: OpenGL, Mir, Wayland, GtkInspector, Etc

GNOME's GTK+ tool-kit saw numerous improvements over the course of 2014 that led it to having a higher development activity rate than the preceding few years.

Among the milestones for GTK+ in 2014 were a lot of Wayland support improvements, the new Popover widget, Google CloudPrint support, GtkInspector for advancing GTK+ debugging, gestures support finally landed, a new default theme, overlay scrollbars, native Mir support, and native OpenGL support.

Of the Wayland-related work were client side decoration improvements, support for new Wayland methods, support for newer versions of Wayland, and other enhancements for GTK on non-X11 Linux environments.

GtkInspector itself was a big area for improvement with numerous enhancements and expanded capabilities since it landed.

The GTK+ native OpenGL support grew too since landing with its GtkGLArea widget, support for new platforms (including Windows support), etc.

Lastly, GTK's Broadway back-end for rendering to HTML5 also gained SSL support.

Further reinforcing the significant progress for GTK+ in 2014 was the Git statistics for the code repository.

2014 was the second busiest year ever for GTK+ in terms of commits with seeing 4862 commits, which was only ever outdone by GTK+ in 2010 with 5,510 commits. GTK+ in 2014 saw 672949 insertions and 592278 deletions of code.

Matthias Clasen of Red Hat dominated GTK's development most of the year with generally delivering over one hundred commits per month. Other common names for heavy GTK+ contributions in 2014 were Carlos Garnacho, Benjamin Otte, and Jasper St. Pierre, among others. In general, GTK+ was seeing contributions from three to four dozen developers per month.

GTK+ is continuing to increase in size and it's code-base is just over 2.83 million lines of code.