GLib 2.58 Is Looking Good With Portability Improvements, Efficient Process Launching

The GLib low-level GNOME library while being quite mature is seeing a significant update with its version 2.58 release due out this September for GNOME 3.30.

Two of the biggest GLib 2.58 changes we have covered up to now on Phoronix has been the new generic reference counting API and more efficient app launching. The reference counting API has been in the works for 6+ years to help GLib's bindings/integration with languages utilizing automatic memory management / garbage collection. The more efficient process launching via the use of posix_nspawn() is also exciting for better performance, particularly on systems suffering from memory pressure.

Longtime GNOME developer Emmanuele Bassi has written a blog post today detailing some of the other accomplishments of GLib 2.58.

Other achievements for GLib 2.58 includes much-improved Meson build system support so that it can be used by default while Autotools will stick around for the time being, better reliability/portability thanks to CI on multiple platforms, file monitoring support on BSD operating systems, and various deprecations.

More details on the current state of GLib 2.58 can be found via the GTK+ blog post with the write-up today by Emmanuele Bassi.