GIMP Punts Painting Off To Separate Thread

As a long overdue move, the GIMP image manipulation program now has support for moving the painting process off to a separate CPU thread.

The actual painting is now performed in a separate thread so that painting isn't stalled when the display updates. With the painting otherwise being in the same thread as the UI, when updates occur there can be measurable synchronization overhead.

With this feature added in over a few hundred lines of code, GIMP paint tools can opt-out of the separate paint thread or it can be disabled by the user with the GIMP_NO_PAINT_THREAD environment variable. Hopefully this addition leads to a more responsive and improved painting experience.

Other recent additions to GIMP Git include a gyroscope controller for the the Panorama Projection filter, a gray theme has been restored for GIMP, and other work. GIMP 2.10 RC1 was released at the end of March while it looks like an RC2 release is just around the corner.