GTK+ 4.0 Gets More House Cleaning, Dropping Old Version References Saves ~7k L.O.C

Yesterday I wrote about GTK4 dropping the Mir display back-end in favor of the Wayland back-end. Additionally, the "big GDK lock" was also stripped out. The latest is some additional cleaning to lighten the tool-kit code-base by about seven thousand lines of code.

The latest significant cleanup is removing old GTK 2.x/3.x version references in the code and documentation. By dropping these old version annotations, GTK+ 4.0 saw nearly eight thousand lines of code removed but just over one thousand new insertions across more than 400 files.

The cleanup is quite a bit bigger than many would have assumed for simply dropping mentions of old GTK versions.

GNOME developers are hoping to release GTK+ 4.0 this fall. Besides lots of clean-ups, GTK+ 4.0 introduces the Vulkan renderer, the GTK Scene Kit finally materializing, OpenGL improvements, various API improvements, and a ton of other work. Some of the GTK+ 4.0 changes are outlined via the road-map Wiki page.