GNOME Developer On GTK4: State-of-the-Art of Toolkit Support

GNOME developer Georges Stavracas has shared his thoughts on the state of the GTK4 tool-kit with the recent work involving a Vulkan renderer, including which also now works on Wayland.

Georges Stavracas was excited to try the current state of GTK4 development but initially hit a segmentation fault. But after overcoming that, he was successful in running GTK4 on Wayland and the widgets being rendered by Vulkan. He commented on his blog, "May not be as exciting, since there are no new visible features but… damn, it’s Gtk+ being rendered with Vulkan on Wayland. It’s basically the state-of-the-art of toolkit support right now. Even better, the absolute majority of applications will gain this for free once they port to Gtk+ 4 series."

He also pointed out that Vulkan's validation layers have already proved useful in finding an Intel Vulkan driver bug with GTK4. From a technical perspective, I too am excited for GTK4 due to the Vulkan renderer and it being faster than OpenGL among other advantages and just being the latest and fun tech.

Hopefully we'll see Qt soon picking up a Vulkan renderer, after all with Qt 5.8 they are having an experimental Direct3D 12 back-end to Qt Quick. The Qt Company did join Khronos and after the graphics stack improvements in Qt 5.8, hopefully it won't be too long before seeing Qt Vulkan rendering, though the Qt 5.9 feature freeze is just around the corner so it won't happen for that release. (There have been some Qt Vulkan experiments such as this Git branch for experimenting with Vulkan-rendered content into a QWindow.)