After five months of development, the release of the cross-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces — GTK 4.4.0 has been presented. GTK 4 is being developed within a new process that aims to provide application developers with a stable and supported API for several years, so that they do not have to redo applications every six months due to API changes in the next branch of GTK.
Among the most notable improvements in GTK 4.4:
- The rendering engine NGL, which uses OpenGL for improved performance while reducing CPU load, has been further enhanced. The new release includes rendering optimizations related to the discontinuation of large intermediate textures. NGL now works correctly with the open driver for Mali GPUs. Support for the old GL rendering engine (GSK_RENDERER=gl) is planned to be dropped in the next branch of GTK.
- Code cleaning and simplification related to OpenGL setup have been carried out. Code support for OpenGL in GTK on systems with recent versions of proprietary NVIDIA drivers is now ensured. The EGL interface (with EGL version requirements raised to 1.4) is considered the primary access method for rendering API. Systems with X11 will revert from EGL to GLX when necessary. Windows will use WGL by default.
- The themes included in the main package have been reorganized and renamed. The built-in themes are now called Default, Default-dark, Default-hc, and Default-hc-dark, while the Adwaita theme has been moved to libadwaita. Dotted lines have replaced wavy lines in themes for highlighting error messages. Support for semi-transparent text highlighting has been added.
- The built-in implementation of input methods is now closer to IBus in displaying and processing compose sequences and dead keys. The ability to use multiple dead keys and combinations that do not result in a single Unicode character (e.g., “ẅ”) has been added. Full support for 32-bit key mapping values (keysyms), including Unicode values, has been implemented.
- The Emoji data has been updated to CLDR 39, opening up localization possibilities for Emoji for various languages and regions.
- The inspection interface is enabled by default, simplifying the debugging of GTK applications.
- On the Windows platform, GL is used for multimedia content playback, while WinPointer API handles tablets and other input devices.
Source: opennet.ru
