GTK (GIMP Toolkit) cross-platform graphics toolkit v4.0.1

GTK (GIMP Toolkit) is a set of graphics toolkits across multiple platforms, released under the LGPL license agreement. Although originally written for GIMP, it has developed into a powerful and flexible design general-purpose graphics library. In particular, being selected by GNOME has made GTK+ widely spread and has become one of the mainstream development tools for developing graphical interface applications under Linux. Of course, GTK+ does not require that it must be on Linux. In fact, GTK+ already has a successful Windows version.

Although GTK is written in C language, you can use GTK in a language you are familiar with, because GTK+ has been bound to almost all popular languages, such as: C++, Guile, Perl, Python, TOM, Ada95, ObjectiveC ,FreePascal,andEiffel.

GTK 4.0.1 has been released, which is the first stable version after the 4.0 major version released last month.

Generally speaking, after a big release, the first release mainly consists of many small bug fixes throughout the code base, and GTK4.0.1 is no exception. There are various bug fixes in this update, as well as themes and documentation updates.

The most important change for GTK 4.0.1 is that the GStreamer media backend now uses OpenGL textures. By using OpenGL textures, it is more efficient when decoding with GPU-based hardware acceleration (such as VA-API), while avoiding bouncing frame data between the GPU and CPU. But this feature still needs to be perfected. Ideally, a GStreamer plug-in with a receiver would be needed to expose the video frames as GdkPaintable objects, but the related work is still not completed. GtkVideo currently can only play media from a file or URL, and does not support multi-channel audio, video overlays, device selection, input, and other things you might need in a media player.

Additionally, to keep the new MacOS backend working, the project team has started setting up CI builds for the latest MacOS devices, including GTK itself and its dependencies (pango, gdk-pixbuf).