GTK5 Development Likely To Heat Up Following GTK 4.12

A new GTK blog post summarized a recent meet-up of GTK core developers for better sorting out active GTK4 work as well as some planning toward GTK5.

GTK developers recently met-up around FOSDEM to discuss icon handling improvements for the GTK toolkit, the idea of experimenting with replacing smaller parts of GTK with a different language that is more expressive than C, input handling improvements, and other topics.

Discussions around the GTK5 tool-kit also happened with some developers eager to begin work on that next major release in order to begin facilitating API breaks and removing deprecated code. Due to color management work planned for GTK 4.12, the current consensus seems to be opening up GTK 4.90 development following the GTK 4.12 release. That opens up GTK4 development towards the end of this calendar year -- or about 3 years after the GTK 4.0 release. In the past it was discussed to have major GTK releases every two years but that hasn't quite happened. Last year was also talk of possibly dropping X11 support with GTK5 to make it Wayland-only. It will be interesting to see what changes end up materializing for this eventual GTK5 release.

More details on the recent GTK developer meet-up and hackfest via the GTK.org blog.