GTK 4.0 Toolkit Officially Released

[zxy_thf]

i think the bigger issue is release cycles. As a newcomer you will be willing to fix bugs in the stable release if they annoy you. but will you be willing on something bigger that may take multiple years before it is ready for consumption.

In web development, Drupal faced a similar issue until recently, where the major releases were getting farther and farther apart. Now they have minor feature releases every 6 months and major releases (which simply remove deprecated API and nothing more) schedules every couple of years, I cannot recall reading similar complaints for a long time.

Hmm this explains part of the phenomena. However that blog post is about the whole Gnome project, and I'm not sure if all projects follow the similar release cycles.
(I'm guessing it's the case? Everytime I upgraded Fedora, apps all changed a little bit.)

C might be a harder language, but i suspect that having faster releases will help with contirbutors.

Whenever I use C, I found string is the most annoying part.
Although I think printf is easier to use than std::cout, strcat two strings is really tedious.

With Rust, having new components written in it will be interesting, but it will have the side efffect of no longer being compilable in GCC, which is the major toolchain used on linux. They would also need to drop most of the Rust packaging nice to haves as they play havoc with this type of stuff.

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.

[AnAccount]

They could theoretically use Rust since you can create C libraries (including headers) in Rust, i.e. see https://www.ultrasaurus.com/2020/01/...brary-in-rust/ . Firefox is also evidence of a project that has successfully integrated Rust into a predominantly C/C++ project

Rust is quite popular in the Gnome community from what I understand, for this very reason. An example is librsvg that was migrated to rust, by gradually replace the code. Now I think it is almost only rust code in librsvg. This also means that the Rust bindings probably will be very solid. So for anyone writing Gnome programs, I recommend looking at Rust instead of C.

[You-]

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 think the bigger issue is release cycles. As a newcomer you will be willing to fix bugs in the stable release if they annoy you. but will you be willing on something bigger that may take multiple years before it is ready for consumption.

In web development, Drupal faced a similar issue until recently, where the major releases were getting farther and farther apart. Now they have minor feature releases every 6 months and major releases (which simply remove deprecated API and nothing more) schedules every couple of years, I cannot recall reading similar complaints for a long time.

C might be a harder language, but i suspect that having faster releases will help with contirbutors.

With Rust, having new components written in it will be interesting, but it will have the side efffect of no longer being compilable in GCC, which is the major toolchain used on linux. They would also need to drop most of the Rust packaging nice to haves as they play havoc with this type of stuff.

[zxy_thf]

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.

Apparently, no: The context creation still requires OpenGL ES 3.0

[mdedetrich]

I presume that your real question is "why is still written in C?" but just in case:
https://gtk.org/docs/language-bindings/

They could theoretically use Rust since you can create C libraries (including headers) in Rust, i.e. see https://www.ultrasaurus.com/2020/01/...brary-in-rust/ . Firefox is also evidence of a project that has successfully integrated Rust into a predominantly C/C++ project

[Baguy]

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.

[scottishduck]

And will you help in fixing that opensource software or the answer is invariably no?

You’re saying open source as though to imply the project isn’t funded by corporations and has full time staff.

[zxy_thf]

is it still based on c?

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.

[jKicker]

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

And will you help in fixing that opensource software or the answer is invariably no?

[scottishduck]

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