GTK+ 4.0 Targeted For Its Initial Release This Fall, GTK+ 5.0 Development To Follow

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GTK+ 4.0 Targeted For Its Initial Release This Fall, GTK+ 5.0 Development To Follow

A few days back I wrote about how GTK+ 4.0 is being talked about for release this year and now a bit more specific timeline is in place...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...18-Fall-Target

[Linuxhippy]

I wonder how GTK4 will fare regarding performance.

Each new GTK+ major release regressed quite a bit (well from a bit to significantly) performance wise (except for GTK-2.8, where the introduction of the cairo rendering backend also caused performance regressions). Now wonder - there is no automated nightly/regression testing in place - so the influence on performance of new features and refactorings of the existing code base is quite often unnoticed - untile someone complains in bugzilla a year later when the code finally hits stable distributions.

[Degra]

I wonder how GTK4 will fare regarding performance.

With GTK4 they are adding OpenGL and Vulkan backends for rendering. The default will switch from Cairo (CPU rendering) to OpenGL.
This should boost performance quite massively.

[flux242]

will it again take ages to port things from 3 to 4 and then from 4 to 5? If I'm not mistaken xfce devs are still porting to 3 after like 5 years?

[EthraZa]

It looks like the migration from KDE 3 to 4. It was a big mess... And now using Plasma 5 we still need the kdelibs4 everywhere. Maybe something is wrong with the numbers 3, 4 and 5... Maybe it's all an universe joke!

[Degra]

will it again take ages to port things from 3 to 4 and then from 4 to 5? If I'm not mistaken xfce devs are still porting to 3 after like 5 years?

I don't think porting to GTK 4 will start until the release of GTK 4.8. This is when GTK4 will be declared stable. Given their current schedule of a release every 6 months it would take until fall 2020 for GTK devs to recommend GTK4 for third party developers.
Together with GTK 4.8 there will also be a release of GTK5, for which same things apply. It would take until 5.8 until they recommend GTK5 to third-party developers.
That's how GTK's new release cycle is supposed to work.
Less or even no breaking changes from X.8 on, because the breaking changes will happen on the Y.0 branch instead.

The plan is that third-party devs will only start porting to a new branch after it has been declared stable with the X.8 release, which means you'll start working on a port ~2 years after the first version of a new branch came out.

So the short answer is yes, it will take a long time to port to GTK4.
However, it should take less than the 5 years for XFCE. A new branch will become stable much faster than GTK3 did, so there will be less overall changes from one branch to the next.

[MoonMoon]

Meanwhile, the original inventors of GTK haven't finished porting their software to GTK3.

[Anvil]

There aint that mich difference between 3 an 4. Im sure the only difference is widgets so porting should be quick

[UpsetingFact]

And they did good.

People wants stable software, not utter breaking messes like GTK3 does.

GTK3 only became stable since 3.22 -which should have been 3.0-, thanks to their insane "versioning"...

will it again take ages to port things from 3 to 4 and then from 4 to 5? If I'm not mistaken xfce devs are still porting to 3 after like 5 years?

XFCE started porting to GTK3 not so long ago because they waited GTK3 to be stable enough.

Thank god there's still people advocating stability and avoiding bugs as much as possible instead of doing "new" things because it's new like horny teens...

I don't think porting to GTK 4 will start until the release of GTK 4.8. This is when GTK4 will be declared stable. Given their current schedule of a release every 6 months it would take until fall 2020 for GTK devs to recommend GTK4 for third party developers.
Together with GTK 4.8 there will also be a release of GTK5, for which same things apply. It would take until 5.8 until they recommend GTK5 to third-party developers.
That's how GTK's new release cycle is supposed to work.
Less or even no breaking changes from X.8 on, because the breaking changes will happen on the Y.0 branch instead.

The plan is that third-party devs will only start porting to a new branch after it has been declared stable with the X.8 release, which means you'll start working on a port ~2 years after the first version of a new branch came out.

That means GTK 4.8 should be 4.0, then anything before that is pure beta right ?

So for the very first time, GTK developers are admitting that they're doing shit since they'll only recommend GTK 4.8 -the real 4.0- only when GTK 5.0 -Beta 1- is out.

"Brilliant" !

[Guest]

Meanwhile, the original inventors of GTK haven't finished porting their software to GTK3.

It will be much easier than the gtk2 to gtk3 migration unless the application is using custom widgets. I asked months ago on irc.