After five months of development, the release of a multiplatform toolkit for creating a graphical user interface - GTK 4.4.0 - is presented. GTK 4 is being developed under a new development process that attempts to provide application developers with a stable and supported API for several years, which can be used without fear that applications will have to be reworked every six months due to API changes in the next GTK branch.
Among the most notable improvements in GTK 4.4 are:
- Continued enhancements to the NGL rendering engine that uses OpenGL to achieve higher performance while reducing CPU load. The new release includes rendering optimizations related to the deprecation of large intermediate textures. Correct work of NGL with an open driver for GPU Mali has been adjusted. Support for the old GL rendering engine (GSK_RENDERER=gl) is planned to be dropped in the next GTK branch.
- Cleaned up and simplified code related to OpenGL setup. The code for OpenGL support in GTK works correctly on systems with the latest versions of proprietary NVIDIA drivers. To access the rendering API, the EGL interface is considered as the main one (requirements for the EGL version have been raised to 1.4). On systems with X11, if necessary, a fallback from EGL to GLX is performed. On Windows, WGL is used by default.
- Reorganized and renamed themes included in the main composition. The built-in themes are now named Default, Default-dark, Default-hc and Default-hc-dark, and the Adwaita theme has been moved to libadwaita. Themes use a dotted line instead of a wavy line to underline error messages. Added support for translucent text selection.
- The built-in implementation of input methods is closer to the behavior of IBus when displaying and processing compose sequences and dead keys. Added the ability to simultaneously use various dead keys and combinations that do not result in the formation of a single Unicode character (for example, "αΊ "). Implemented full support for 32-bit key mapping values ββ(keysyms), including Unicode values.
- The emoji data has been updated to the CLDR 39 set, opening up opportunities for emoji localization for languages ββand locales.
- By default, an inspection interface is included to make it easier to debug GTK applications.
- On the Windows platform, GL is used to play multimedia content, and the WinPointer API is used to work with tablets and other input devices.
Source: opennet.ru