GTK+ 4.0 Likely Being Released In Spring Of 2019

While the GTK+ 4.0 tool-kit was previously talked about for release by the end of 2018, that's now looking more like spring of 2019 when this next major version will be released.

Happening the past week was the GUADEC 2018 GNOME developer conference and now the GTK+ team has put out their notes from the planning and discussions that happened pertaining to the next major version of the tool-kit.

In case you missed the recent GTK news, a GTK+ 3.24 minor feature update release is being planned for this fall alongside GNOME 3.30. GTK+ 3.24 will serve as an interim release until GTK+ 4.0 is available and adopted.

When it comes to GTK4, among the items they are still working on are finishing up the drag-n-drop (DND) support, introducing GtkTopLevel and properly handling pop-overs, adding transformations, creating a shortcuts event controller, porting the GtkTextView to render nodes, ensuring the Cairo back-end is performing at least on-par of GTK3, porting various libraries to the new interfaces, and other miscellaneous work.

Items that still might arrive for GTK+ 4.0 but more than likely will be postponed until GTK+ 5.0 are constraint-based layout support, shader compiler and application-provided shaders support, and UI designer support. It was also brought up that while the GTK4 Windows support is turning out okay, the GTK4 macOS back-end with Quartz is in a "much worse state", but that might be improved with a proper continuous integration setup.

At this point they are looking to release GTK+ 4.0 officially ahead of GNOME 3.32 in the spring of 2019, but they will be firming up their plans still soon. More details over on the GTK.org blog.