GTK 4 Toolkit's New OpenGL Renderer Is Maturing Well

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GTK 4 Toolkit's New OpenGL Renderer Is Maturing Well

The new OpenGL renderer work for GTK 4 as a post-4.0 improvement is shaping up well and should really help push along the open-source toolkit on macOS...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTK-4-GL-NGL-Maturing

[V10lator]

From the blog post:

Especially after you actually try to use MoltenVK on macOS and realize it’s a giant maze

Second, it’s likely that Zink will be a viable (and well funded) alternative soon

So... Vulkan -> Metal via MoltenVK is not good but OpenGL -> Vulkan -> Metal via Zink and MoltenVK will be good?

Also no matter what route, he itself says anything is using Metal in the end:

it looks like OpenGL on the M1 was built on top of Metal

So why not write a Metal backend instead of using a deprecated API?

[fafreeman]

From the blog post:


So... Vulkan -> Metal via MoltenVK is not good but OpenGL -> Vulkan -> Metal via Zink and MoltenVK will be good?

Also no matter what route, he itself says anything is using Metal in the end:

So why not write a Metal backend instead of using a deprecated API?

i admit i'm not mac savvy at all as i don't use a mac, but is there really a sizable market share of gtk usage on mac to even warrant gtk support for it at all? it seems like 99% of gtk usage is solely on linux.

[coder]

i admit i'm not mac savvy at all as i don't use a mac, but is there really a sizable market share of gtk usage on mac to even warrant gtk support for it at all? it seems like 99% of gtk usage is solely on linux.

I hear rumors of a large developer community on macs, particularly their laptops. If true, then there could be a small but influential number of GTK users on Macs.

[Baguy]

What about OpenGL ES 2?

[coder]

What about OpenGL ES 2?

Ummm... what about it? Do you mean to ask if it's still supported?

I have no idea about GTK's support for it, but I do know that it's very old skool-style fixed-function OpenGL. Probably, most modern GPUs support at least OpenGL ES 3.

[jKicker]

i admit i'm not mac savvy at all as i don't use a mac, but is there really a sizable market share of gtk usage on mac to even warrant gtk support for it at all? it seems like 99% of gtk usage is solely on linux.

Well gtk is not gnome, so you have Gimp, Inkscape and a lot of other cross platform software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GTK_applications
So indeed for a gui cross platform toolkit that wants adoption it has to support mac, especially in today's age like you get with Qt, Flutter or any other relevant UI framework / library.

[V1tol]

it looks like OpenGL on the M1 was built on top of Metal

Actually that happened way too long time ago. On MacOS 10.13 OpenGL was already built on top of Metal drivers (observed by crash stack traces) but still contained old OpenGL driver path. IMHO main reason why NVIDIA stopped releasing their drivers for MacOS - 10.14 dropped legacy OpenGL driver path completely and we know NVIDIA developers skills.

On ARM iPhones that happened maybe in iOS 9 for 64-bit devices - I debugged one OpenGL app on iPhone 5S in 2015 iirc and stacktraces also contained Metal symbols behind OpenGL.

[Sonadow]

I hear rumors of a large developer community on macs, particularly their laptops. If true, then there could be a small but influential number of GTK users on Macs.

Developers on Mac have got no business spending time on GTK when there is a much superior graphical toolkit on macOS to play with.

[coder]

Developers on Mac have got no business spending time on GTK when there is a much superior graphical toolkit on macOS to play with.

No, the point is that they might need to build & use opensource tools which depend on GTK.

As you say, I don't expect anyone developing non-portable Mac apps to bother with GTK.