GTK+ Developers Call For Help To Finish Cross-Platform OpenGL Support

jones_supa writes OpenGL support under GTK is getting into good shape for providing a nice, out-of-the-box experience by default on key platforms for the GTK+ 3.16 / GNOME 3.16 release in March. For a few weeks now within mainline GTK+ has been native OpenGL support and as part of that a new GtkGLArea widget for allowing OpenGL drawing within GTK applications. Since that initial work landed, there's been more GTK+ OpenGL code progressing that right now primarily benefits Linux X11 and Wayland users. While good progress is being made and improvements still ongoing to the GNOME toolkit, GNOME developers are requesting help in ensuring other GTK+ backends can benefit from this OpenGL support. If you are using or planning to use GTK+ 3 on Windows or OS X, and you know how to use OpenGL on those two platforms, please consider helping out the GTK+ developers by implementing the GdkGLContext API using WGL and AppleGL.

Comments

Re:help them

[xiando]

GTK+ used to be a general purpose toolkit and it was originally named the GIMP Toolkit. The gtk+ homepage still refers to it as such. It is, in theory, not only for GNOME. The sad reality, though, is that these days the GNOME developers are busy removing features from GTK+ which breaks existing applications, cripples them and removes features from them so in practice it's basically a GNOME toolkit as of right now. That does not mean you can't submit patches to it in order to make it more general-purpose. If this is worth your time is, as you indicate, an open question, though. Like .. what is the point of submitting a patch like "This patch reverts your removal of icons from menu items and puts the icons back in the menus"? I could go on but you get the idea. Many of us have simply decided to stop using GTK+ for development because of their various unacceptable choices and see no point in contributing to this project which has sadly left only GNOME developers to work on it.

Qt...

[Tough Love]

Need I point out that QT has had cross platform OpenGL support for many years? In QT, this is mature, reliable, well integrated and easy to use.

Re:Qt...

[sfcat]

Couldn't agree more. I spent 3 years writing an OpenGL app using GTK+. I just spent the last 6 months porting it to QT. And even with having to using C++ in places in the code (I wanted it to be pure C) I couldn't be happier with QT. And I probably couldn't be less happy with GTK+. When I finally got the GTK+ version working on windows, it had terrible performance. GTK+ is a total mess developed by people with no desire for you to use their code. For years the GTK+ devs actively questioned the usefulness of supporting OpenGL and refused to even answer questions about the OpenGL support. The devs are openly hostile to things like OpenGL and they break compatibility on a regular basis. The QT version of my app's code has probably 30000 fewer lines due to far more sane APIs and much more useful widget APIs. Why anyone in this day would use GTK+ for anything unless they were required to use only pure C in their app is beyond me.

Re:help them

[L-One-L-One]

I fully agree. I like the GTK+ API and I still continue to use it because shifting to another toolkit for my apps would be costly. But I'm loosing patience:

GTK+ development has become an unprofessional mess. Functions get deprecated even with minor version changes: you develop your app with version 3.xx and distribute it. Then people move to 3.yy (where yy>xx) and bang your app does not work anymore because someone decided to *remove* a function from GTK+ without any consideration for existing apps out there. Sometimes the fix involves a new function that does not exist in the previous version of the library, so you can't even find a real fix that would work with all versions from 3.xx and above. You just add some ugly preprocessor macros in your code to deal with different versions of GTK+ at source level...

Re:GNOME toolki? nope GIMP Toolkit

[MrEricSir]

Actually, GIMP still uses GTK+2.