GTK+ No More - It's Just GTK As Developers Prepare For This Year's GTK 4.0

Beyond the FOSDEM conference itself this past week in Brussels, GNOME developers also used the occasion once again for hosting a developer "hackfest" as they prepare for the home stretch in GTK 4.0 development.

First up, the developers did decide this week to do away with "GTK+" with the project formally just going by "GTK" now... The "plus" is no more. "The "plus" was added to "GTK" once it was moved out of the GIMP sources tree and the project gained utilities like GLib and the GTK type system, in order to distinguish it from the previous, in-tree version. Very few people are aware of this history, and it's kind of confusing from the perspective of both newcomers and even expert users; people join the wrong IRC channel, the URLs on wikis are fairly ugly, etc."

On the technical matters for this year's GTK hackfest, the developers were figuring out what work is needed before they can retire GtkTreeView/GtkIconView, coming up with unified key handling for input, layout managers in working towards constraint-based layout management for GTK, merging widgets from the libhandy mobile library, 2D/3D widget transformations, and still seeking to land an animations framework for GTK4.

Performance improvements and memory usage reductions also remain a big focus for GTK developers. Exciting times ahead with the huge GTK4 update out on the not too distant horizon.

Those wanting to learn more about the outcome for this year's GTK Brussels hackfest can do so on the GTK developer blog.