GTK+ 4.0 Might Be Ready To Ship This Year With Its Many Toolkit Improvements

Famed GNOME developer Matthias Clasen of Red Hat provided an update on the state of the GTK4 tool-kit during this week's DevConf.cz event in Brno.

Clasen covered the differences in drawing, input, and widgets between GTK3 and GTK4. He also reiterated how the Vulkan renderer, OpenGL renderer, new GDK APIs, event controllers, and composite widgets are among the headline features for GTK+ 4.0.

But still needing to be done are completing the API clean-ups, exposing graphics shaders for applications, transformation support for widgets, wiring up some of the more complicated widgets like TreeView and TextView, and writing some "cool" examples for GTK4.

Those wanting to help out with GTK4 development can work on creating custom demos/applications, porting existing GTK2/GTK3 applications to GTK4, converting custom widgets to the new APIs, and testing. If all goes well, GTK+ 4.0 could be released in 2018.

This GTK+ 4.0 update for those not in Brno can be found via this PDF slide deck.