A few weeks ago, I was curious to test Gtk+ 4. I know it has some awsome features like OpenGL rendering, major cleanups and other hot stuff, but didn’t have the chance to check it out until then.
I was mostly excited about Vulkan.
I know both of my laptop’s graphic cards support Vulkan. It’s a hybrid Intel Broadwell G2 + NVidia GeForce 920M, although I don’t use the latter because Linux sucks hard with Dual GPU.
Downloaded the latest Gtk+ source, compiled and… nothing. Immediate segmentation fault. Yay! What a great chance to get involved with the next major Gtk+ version development!
So, this happened:
May not be as exciting, since there are no new visible features but… damn, it’s Gtk+ being rendered with Vulkan on Wayland. It’s basically the state-of-the-art of toolkit support right now. Even better, the absolute majority of applications will gain this for free once they port to Gtk+ 4 series.
Getting this into an usable state wasn’t easy, but fortunately, Vulkan has an ~amazing~ thing called “Validation Layers” that simplified the tedious debugging process a whole lot (of course, only after making the validation layers work with Gtk+). This work even uncovered a driver bug in the Intel driver, which was quickly fixed by Lionel Landwerlin and Jason Ekstrand (thanks folks!)
Of course, there are many improvements that still must be done. A bright future is lying ahead!
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