GTK 4.0 Toolkit Officially Released

[zxy_thf]

I'm not sure this is a programming language problem. It looks like there's no community around the gtk/gnome project, it's just red hat employees with a few contributions by canonical, debian and collabora. I guess it's fine as long as red hat is alive, but this doesn't look that great beyond that. Very disappointing, by looking at these figures I don't even see the point of making gtk4 in the first place.

I won't be worrying if the numbers are for Gtk only. Qt is on a similar boat -- mostly developed by Qt Company.

The real problem is, these statistical numbers are for the whole gnome project, covering the libraries (Gtk), the DE (mutter and gnome-shell), the application (Builder, Evince, etc).
In other words, most of the whole Gnome ecosystem (not only Gtk) is developed by RH.

[zxy_thf]

C++ is garbage and for lazy programmers C is much more stable and people who program with C are much better programmers

Good luck finding enough "much better programmers" for an OSS project.

Well I just realized this will not be a problem for an elitism community, but please do not make any noise about "we need more developers" in the future. Keep clam and accept the consequences of elitism.

[zxy_thf]

C++ is a terrible choice for a general purpose GUI library

KDE people have something to say.

You could just expose C bindings in your C++ library, but in this case you have to limit yourself to a big subset of C++ anyways making the effort kinda pointless.

Nobody stop projects doing C++ -> C ABI -> C++ header only binding.
This is how clover was implemented.

Laziness is the main reason of not doing so, to be frank.

[Alexmitter]

Will GTK4's GPU acceleration support OpenGL 2.0 that the Pinephone's GPU supports?

QT already supports full GPU acceleration on the Mali 400 with GL 2.0... But if GTK4 can too, then phosh will finally be competitive in performance.

The

The GLES renderer still needs work, the OpenGL Standard renderer works on the Pinephone.

[Alexmitter]

The question is will this conceivably fix the absolute mess that is GNOME and the answer is invariably no.

Ah yes, a absolute mess. Trying to be the biggest clown of the day?

[Anarchy]

There is an interesting post about Gnome (not only Gtk): https://hpjansson.org/blag/2020/12/1...ying-of-gnome/
I'm guessing having* to use C is the main factor of "Although recruitment is stable, newcomers don’t seem to be hitting their stride in terms of commits."

* Yes I know there is no formal requirement that you must write something in C, but I also don't think newcomers will feel easy in a C dormant community when their main PL is something else - especially when they're trying to contribute to an existing project.

I'm not sure this is a programming language problem. It looks like there's no community around the gtk/gnome project, it's just red hat employees with a few contributions by canonical, debian and collabora. I guess it's fine as long as red hat is alive, but this doesn't look that great beyond that. Very disappointing, by looking at these figures I don't even see the point of making gtk4 in the first place.

[andre30correia]

C++ is garbage and for lazy programmers C is much more stable and people who program with C are much better programmers

[mdedetrich]

I'm not a huge fan of Rust. Moving from C to C++ will be smoother IMO, and this process already has success stories (gcc).
In addition, smarter pointers and RAII can address quite a few memory management issues.

C++ is a terrible choice for a general purpose GUI library because the C++ ABI breaks all of the time. Even though C has its fair share of problems, one of its redeeming features is having an ultra stable ABI (talking decade, or even more here).

You could just expose C bindings in your C++ library, but in this case you have to limit yourself to a big subset of C++ anyways making the effort kinda pointless.

[You-]

Moving from C to C++ will be smoother IMO.

This is very unlikely to happen. some of the most prolific contributors are very much against using C++. Another one wants to use some of its features, but I doubt they will go for it ever.

[Danielsan]

The real question is... Will adopt XFCE4 the GTK4 before the GTK6 will be released?