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Thanks for making Ardour! When will it be upgraded from GTK2 (which reached its end of life two years ago) to GTK3 or GTK4, and are there any plans of supportin

Thanks for making Ardour! When will it be upgraded from GTK2 (which reached its end of life two years ago) to GTK3 or GTK4, and are there any plans of supporting SDL2 instead, to ensure stability and portability over time?

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
There are zero plans to port to SDL2. There are zero plans to ever move to GTK3 or GTK4 or GTKN. There are dreams & aspirations to drop our use of GTK and fall back on GDK (just a window & event abstraction), but this is not on any timetable because it means reimplementing text-entry, menus, tree/list views and the file browser.
- CameronNemo 4y ago
  By "zero plans" do you mean you have evaluated them and decided they are incompatible with Ardour's goals, or just that there is nothing in the pipe or on the roadmap to do the port? One major feature that gtk3+ (or SDL2) brings is Wayland compatibility.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    Porting a 600k line codebase to a different GUI is a fool's game (the vast majority of Ardour's code and complexity is in the GUI, not the backend). We did it once before, from GTK1 to GTK2, which should have been easy. And indeed, the actual GUI toolkit switchover was relatively easy. The problem is that along the way, you keep running into other issues and ideas. We likely could have done GTK1 to GTK2 in a month, but it took nearly a year. We have no need of traditional desktop GUI toolkits (or SDL) except for the 4 widget classes I mentioned. We have our own internal canvas-based "toolkit" that is Cairo-based, and thus only requires a window+rgba-buffer+event abstraction.