GIMP 3.2.6 Released with Some Early Preparations Toward Eventual GTK4 Port

phoronix.com

9 points·Bender··4 comments

Doesn’t GIMP have a hardware abstraction layer making this kind of port trivial? If not I recommend that the team looks at how games are made portable. Think about different versions of GTK as different hardware platforms and design the software accordingly.

GTK handles the UI as well as UI events (click, key, scroll, drag, etc). It's very tightly integrated into GIMP itself (the 'G' in GTK use to stand for GIMP, in fact), and has been for decades. GIMP is not new software. :)

The challenge of new GTK versions is that they keep simplifying things, because it's aimed at software that's much less complex than GIMP. For instance, the tree views that GIMP relies on for so many things like layer docks are deprecated in GTK4. To deal with that, we'll have to do some redesigns of core features.

There's no intermediate layer in-between GIMP and GTK. It wouldn't be impossible to code, but with the current number of volunteer developers, it would mean further delaying features that most users care more about.

That sounds horrible. This is a central part of Gimp interface. Would it not make sense to fork into a different toolkit focused on complex applications?

We joke about it sometimes. :)

GIMP's maintainer has half-seriously said that he's not even thinking about another GUI library change/port until after GIMP 3.6. I think we want to get more features available for users first, so we don't fall into same trap of 2.10 -> 3.0 where we mixed doing both at once.

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