GTK4 To Bring Better & Faster macOS Support

On top of the many other improvements for the soon-to-be-released GTK4 toolkit, there is now better support for Apple's macOS.

GTK4 is bringing with it a new macOS back-end that helps improve the performance. The new macOS back-end supports software-based rendering via Cairo or GPU-accelerated rendering by means of OpenGL. Yes, OpenGL is deprecated on macOS but does remain available with macOS 11.0 Big Sur. There isn't yet any Apple Metal or Vulkan-on-MoltenVK support for the macOS back-end with GTK 4.0.

Regardless of whether using the CPU or GPU based rendering paths, the new GTK4 back-end on macOS should be much faster than the prior Quartz Cairo code.

More details on the macOS improvements for GTK 4.0 via this blog post by Red Hat's Christian Hergert.

Meanwhile this Friday (18 December) there is going to be a GTK4 virtual release part hosted by GNOME. "GTK4 is coming out and we're going to party! Join us on Friday the 18th of December to celebrate the release of GTK4. There will be Q&A time with GTK developers, including Emmanuele Bassi and Matthias Clasen, and open social time. We'll be hosting the event using the meet.gnome.org."