GTK+ 3.16's New GtkGLArea Widget Gets Improved

Earlier this month GTK+ 3.16 development code gained native OpenGL support. This GTK+ OpenGL support involved adding support for wrapping an OpenGL context for native windows with GLX on X11 and EGL on Wayland to use OpenGL to paint everything. A GtkGLArea widget was also added for providing OpenGL drawing access within GTK+ applications. The GtkGLArea has already seen some more improvements to better GTK's OpenGL support.

Following today's GNOME 3.15.1 release, Alexander Larsson of Red Hat landed some significant GtkGLArea widget improvements.

Alexander did some major reworking of GtkGLArea to the way buffers are allocated to allow support for stencil buffers and yield other improvements. He also added a GtkGLArea resize signal so the GL code can recalculate when the window size changes. Last but not least he added a profile property for allowing OpenGL 3.2 core contexts.

All of these improvements will be found in GNOME 3.15/3.16 that will be officially released as stable in March along with a ton of other GNOME desktop enhancements.