After three months of development, the release of the cross-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces — GTK 4.2.0 — has been presented. GTK 4 is evolving under a new development process aimed at providing application developers with a stable API supported for several years, allowing them to use it without fearing that they will have to redesign their applications due to API changes with every GTK branch release.
In this new release, primarily bugs have been fixed and improvements made to the API based on feedback from developers who ported their applications to GTK4. Among the most notable improvements in GTK 4.2 are:
- The addition of the NGL renderer, a new rendering engine using OpenGL, which is enabled by default on Linux, Windows, and macOS. The NGL renderer provides higher performance while reducing CPU load. To revert to the old rendering engine, launch the application with the environment variable GSK_RENDERER=gl.
- The processing of Compose sequences and dead keys that alter the appearance of the next entered character has been reworked.
- The ability to use GTK as a subproject in the Meson build system has been implemented, allowing GTK and all its dependencies to be built as part of the build environment of a custom application and to obtain all build artifacts for delivery with the application using the chosen toolchain.
- Support for compiling GTK for Windows and macOS has been improved using native toolchains for these platforms.
- The API documentation has been reworked, using a new generator, gi-docgen, which provides a more user-friendly layout, including buttons for copying code examples to the clipboard, a visual representation of the class hierarchy and interfaces, a list of inherited properties, signals, and methods. The interface supports client-side search and automatically adapts to different screen sizes. A new website, docs.gtk.org, has been launched for the documentation, which also offers accompanying guides on GObject introspection, Pango, and GdkPixbuf.
- Performance optimization of various components, from the shaders used for rendering GLSL to objects for accessibility.
- Subpixel text positioning implemented with the new versions of the Cairo library.
- Adaptive interface layout for emoji selection is provided.
- Enhanced support for the Wayland protocol extension for input handling.
- Scrolling performance improved in the text viewing widget.
- Shadow rendering enhanced in popover widgets.
Source: opennet.ru
