6 ms·

Classic GTK1 GUI Library

140 points by MaximilianEmel 1y ago

vintagedave 1y ago
I never followed the history of GTK very much but reading about non-compatibility between versions surprises me, just as a matter of software engineering re a critical dependency. I am unsure from the page, just that it implied: is there software in 2025 still using GTK v1?
- gary_0 1y ago
  `apt search libgtk` on Linux Mint 21.2 doesn't show it. Only versions 2, 3 and 4. Searching https://pkgs.org https://pkgs.org says that most distros don't have a gtk 1 package... except for Slackware!
- badsectoracula 1y ago
  Lazarus[0] has a Gtk 1.2 backend that i occasionally fix (though it has been a while since i tested it), but you need to install the Gtk 1.2 libraries from source[1] since no current distro aside from Slackware (from where i got the sources and patches) packages it. Even Slackware though doesn't provide gdk_pixbuf (which Lazarus needs) though, so you'd need to compile that. I'm not sure if GTK1 (the linked one) is backwards and/or binary compatible with Gtk 1.2 though. [0] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ [1] http://runtimeterror.com/pages/badsector/gtk12/ http://runtimeterror.com/pages/badsector/gtk12/
- the_biot 1y ago
  The non-compatibility has over the years become the defining feature of GTK/Gnome. The maintainers seem to go out of their way to break API, for no reason at all. That extends to Gnome applications as well. I recently found a GTK API call that was deprecated in GTK 3.0, only for its replacement to be deprecated by 3.16. These are not thoughtful people, with a vision for the future. They are idiots that inherited something great (GTK 1), and have spent decades thoroughly fucking it up.
  - thw_9a83c 1y ago
    I wouldn't say that maintainers break API, "for no reason at all", but surely they don't make the stable API a priority either. The fact is, that every API breaking change is an insult to developers/users of that API. But this is an unfortunate state of the Linux desktop.
    - the_biot 1y ago
      Yes, no reason at all. I submit as evidence gtk_hbox_new(), there since the very first version of GTK, and deprecated in 3.2, in favor of gtk_box_new(GTK_ORIENTATION_HORIZONTAL). It's a prime example of something that was entirely unnecessary, could have been hidden from the user with a macro, or (pointlessly) added but keeping the old API in place. They do this all the time. It's not just the idiocy, it's the blatant hostility towards their users that gets me.
      - thw_9a83c 1y ago
        This is sad. Actually, a long time ago I stopped working on two Linux desktop applications that used KDE framework libraries. I managed to port them from KDE1 to KDE2, but I got frustrated and lost my patience with KDE3 changes which had nothing to do with my application and I just gave up. Sorry to hear that GTK is the same constantly changing target. After this experience I actually like Web-UIs and CLI apps a lot more.
      - Sophira 1y ago
        Sounds like the work of architecture astronauts: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...
      - rleigh 1y ago
        Yes, this is a prime example of completely gratuitous breakage. The change adds zero value. It's a deliberate API break. And it could have been made a non-breaking change all for the sake of a single one-line macro or inline function. This isn't unintentional. It's a deliberate choice they have made. And not just this one, it's happened repeatedly over the years. The thing that really gets me, as an end-user/developer, is that it forces incompatible changes not only in my codebases, but in every other application developer's codebases worldwide. A small change in GTK+ imposes hundreds of thousands of man-hours of maintenance work upon every application developer. And this burdensome work not only takes time, effort and money, it doesn't improve our applications one iota, and on top of that, it breaks backward compatibility so our code will not longer build with older GTK+ versions. Most of us won't be chasing the latest development release, applications might need to target a wide range of distributions with a wide range of GTK+ versions. So it's a logistical nightmare as well. The lack of concern for the needs of actual application developers is why I eventually had to give up on it entirely. At some point it doesn't make any sense either commercially or for free software development, it's just masochism.
joz1-k 1y ago
Nice to see that someone is still maintaining the original GTK1 toolkit. It's like the classic Win32 UI API for the Linux/Unix. Linux UI libraries are a constantly moving target and one can be easily more occupied by adapting to those toolkit API changes instead of focusing on the features of the application itself. I guess that CinePaint developers decided at some point that they don't want to endure API changes in the UI toolkit anymore. On the other hand, I think GTK1 doesn't even support Unicode.
- pferde 1y ago
  Yeah, I think GTK2 would be a better candidate to keep maintaining. GTK3 is where it started to go to hell in a handbasket.
  - zokier 1y ago
    Gtk2 also had exceptionally long lifetime, initial release in 2002 and last release in 2020. In contrast Gtk1 was initially released in 1998 and last release was 2001.
- WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
  It doesn't support Unicode, doesn't support font antialiasing, and instead of fontconfig, you need to grapple with X11 core font support, using ttmkfdir and friends, and make the X11 server aware of where the fonts are. It's some experience I definitely don't miss from those days.
  - joz1-k 1y ago
    Oh, yes, I remember those early times as well. :) The question is whether it's possible to maintain the legacy API and upgrade the internal architecture to use more modern approaches. I think it's almost always possible, but perhaps the cost to develop and maintain such a legacy layer is too high for an open-source desktop environment and toolkit. The Windows OS managed to support old APIs quite well, but the available resources are incomparable.
  - anthk 1y ago
badsectoracula 1y ago
Is it binary backwards compatible with Gtk1.2? AFAICT from the description it seems to be based on Gtk1.2 but it is its own thing. I've being using Gtk 1.2 + patches[0] (which i made by combining the last release with a few patches from Slackware) to occasionally check Lazarus' Gtk1 support. It is also neat if you want to make self-contained binaries, for example this little animation utility i wrote some time ago[1] has a Gtk1-based build with Gtk1 linked statically on it and the tool relying on just X11 and OpenGL. [0] http://runtimeterror.com/pages/badsector/gtk12/ http://runtimeterror.com/pages/badsector/gtk12/ [1] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/piecemod/ http://runtimeterror.com/tools/piecemod/
HexDecOctBin 1y ago
Somewhat tangential: Is there a lightweight distribution of GTK2? I was shopping for a cross-platform GUI library with a C API, and GTK2 seemed like the right choice. But the Windows distribution [1] had 30-40 DLLs and none of them seemed to be optional in DependencyWalker. [1] https://github.com/tschoonj/GTK-for-Windows-Runtime-Environment-Installer https://github.com/tschoonj/GTK-for-Windows-Runtime-Environm...
roschdal 1y ago
GTK1 is the best GTK.
Western0 1y ago
I like GTK but...... small example have error (memory leak) in valgrind
- unwind 1y ago
  Without further detail, that's not very helpful. GTK doesn't implement garbage collection, you need to clean up by destroying widgets and other resources that you have created. Of course, the operating system will free all resources used by your process when it ends, so that kind of final cleanup is often omitted (and even more so in example code).
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    GTK intentionally doesn't calls free, unless some debug symbol is called. This is to prevent trashing before exiting, but is annoying when targeting correctness.
  - Western0 1y ago
    show me any example from oficial documentation gtk[1,2,3...] qt etc for no memory leak in valgrind
wer232essf 1y ago
[dead]
zerr 1y ago
Is Glade unmaintained nowadays? The last release is 3 years old.
- spookie 1y ago
  They're working on something for GTK4 iirc
thedumbname 1y ago
Tried to build on Windows, Mac, Linux: different errors on each platform.
- diabllicseagull 1y ago
  same here
- badsectoracula 1y ago
  Judging from the commit history, i get the impression that commits are made regardless of if the library builds or not.
dsijak 1y ago
Ubuntu doesn’t ship libgtk1.2 anymore in standard repositories.
rcarmo 1y ago
I'm so happy to know this exists because every single cross-platform UI toolkit I've used in the past few decades is more complex and weird. (Not that GTK1 can't be complex and weird, more that we've lost the art of creating native GUI toolkits that make sense.)
- wallopinski 1y ago
  [dead]
- OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago
  It's mostly because we have different aspects ratios and resolutions now, but also things like accessibility play a role. You're happy to use simple UI toolkits, but you'll very quickly realize it doesn't look good when someone resizes the app
  - formerly_proven 1y ago
    Tk usually looks good when resizing the app. Much better than any of the quintuply queued and buffered windows stuff anyhow
itomato 1y ago
I was about to make a Cinepaint joke, but it seems that's already been addressed.
jandrese 1y ago
One thing that GTK lost in the transition to GTK2 was working well over slow Internet connections. I remember how even on a dial up modem you got pretty acceptable performance out of a GTK1 app, so long as it wasn't shoving big bitmaps around. GTK2 on the other hand was always dog slow over remote X connections for no apparent reason.
- xantronix 1y ago
  You actually hit the nail on the head; pixbuf/pixmap font rendering on the client side rather than X server side text rendering.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Note that on X, client and server are inverted.
    - dpassens 1y ago
      But GP used client and server correctly, no? In the traditional model, the server renders the text it received from the client. Nowadays, the client renders it itself and pushes the whole bitmap to the server.
      - pjmlp 1y ago
        Pushing the whole bitmap is much slower over dialup, versus a set of commands.
        dpassens 1y ago
        I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm merely pointing out that you're not disagreeing with GP either.
        vidarh 1y ago
        Yes? But older X code used to use server side font rendering. The move to client side is the new thing. So this still sounds like the original comment got it right, though I guess ordered in a way that might make it ambiguous.
robinsrowe 1y ago
Thank you! Nice that people care about my work on GTK1. I haven't announced a GTK1 release, so don’t expect it to be stable yet. GTK1 interests me as it is necessary to build retro apps I like. CinePaint being one, and also dozens of other classic GTK apps. A technical reason to care about GTK1 is code size. GTK2 is much larger than GTK1. GTK3 is much larger than GTK2. > it seems to be based on Gtk1.2 but it is its own thing. Yes. Historically, GTK1 was maintained as 3 separate projects across the 3 major operating systems by three different teams, not a single codebase. I created the Windows port. Later I took over the MacOS port that someone had started, but had abandoned before completion. After gtk.org deprecated Linux GTK1, I took on that code, too. As I combine code from different versions of GTK1 from different operating systems, it breaks things. My current effort is to complete integration of the MacOS and Linux code with my Windows code, and remove resultant bugs. > maintain the legacy API and upgrade the internal architecture to use more modern approaches. GTK1 is of a GTK 1.2 flavor plus some enhancements. Yes, I want to smooth off old rough edges, to make GTK1 better with fonts and pixbuffers. > I present you gtkaa [GTK1 anti-aliasing patch] Thank you! Will take a stab at integrating that. I previously integrated the GTK1 dark-mode patch. If there are other interesting GTK1 patches in the archives somewhere, let me know. I’ve heard that gtk.org wasn’t very welcoming to GTK1 patches. > Is there a lightweight distribution of GTK2? Maybe in the future. CinePaint conditionally compiled with GTK1 or GTK2 using an #ifdef. Not a lot of changes to make it build either as GTK1 or GTK2. The GTK2 API broke GTTK1 compatibility in some silly ways. For example, changing the order or arguments in function calls of the same name. Or, making an API that took one call in GTK1 take 2 calls in GTK2, or vice versa. Minor stuff, at least in the calls used by CinePaint. Are other GTK1 apps as easy to port to GTK2 as was CinePaint? I want to add common GTK2 APIs to GTK1 to see how that goes. Doing so would make GTK1 into a very lightweight implementation of the GTK2 API.

I never followed the history of GTK very much but reading about non-compatibility between versions surprises me, just as a matter of software engineering re a critical dependency. I am unsure from the page, just that it implied: is there software in 2025 still using GTK v1?

gary_0 1y ago
`apt search libgtk` on Linux Mint 21.2 doesn't show it. Only versions 2, 3 and 4. Searching https://pkgs.org https://pkgs.org says that most distros don't have a gtk 1 package... except for Slackware!
badsectoracula 1y ago
Lazarus[0] has a Gtk 1.2 backend that i occasionally fix (though it has been a while since i tested it), but you need to install the Gtk 1.2 libraries from source[1] since no current distro aside from Slackware (from where i got the sources and patches) packages it. Even Slackware though doesn't provide gdk_pixbuf (which Lazarus needs) though, so you'd need to compile that. I'm not sure if GTK1 (the linked one) is backwards and/or binary compatible with Gtk 1.2 though. [0] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ [1] http://runtimeterror.com/pages/badsector/gtk12/ http://runtimeterror.com/pages/badsector/gtk12/
the_biot 1y ago
The non-compatibility has over the years become the defining feature of GTK/Gnome. The maintainers seem to go out of their way to break API, for no reason at all. That extends to Gnome applications as well. I recently found a GTK API call that was deprecated in GTK 3.0, only for its replacement to be deprecated by 3.16. These are not thoughtful people, with a vision for the future. They are idiots that inherited something great (GTK 1), and have spent decades thoroughly fucking it up.
- thw_9a83c 1y ago
  I wouldn't say that maintainers break API, "for no reason at all", but surely they don't make the stable API a priority either. The fact is, that every API breaking change is an insult to developers/users of that API. But this is an unfortunate state of the Linux desktop.
  - the_biot 1y ago
    Yes, no reason at all. I submit as evidence gtk_hbox_new(), there since the very first version of GTK, and deprecated in 3.2, in favor of gtk_box_new(GTK_ORIENTATION_HORIZONTAL). It's a prime example of something that was entirely unnecessary, could have been hidden from the user with a macro, or (pointlessly) added but keeping the old API in place. They do this all the time. It's not just the idiocy, it's the blatant hostility towards their users that gets me.
    - thw_9a83c 1y ago
      This is sad. Actually, a long time ago I stopped working on two Linux desktop applications that used KDE framework libraries. I managed to port them from KDE1 to KDE2, but I got frustrated and lost my patience with KDE3 changes which had nothing to do with my application and I just gave up. Sorry to hear that GTK is the same constantly changing target. After this experience I actually like Web-UIs and CLI apps a lot more.
    - Sophira 1y ago
      Sounds like the work of architecture astronauts: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...
    - rleigh 1y ago
      Yes, this is a prime example of completely gratuitous breakage. The change adds zero value. It's a deliberate API break. And it could have been made a non-breaking change all for the sake of a single one-line macro or inline function. This isn't unintentional. It's a deliberate choice they have made. And not just this one, it's happened repeatedly over the years. The thing that really gets me, as an end-user/developer, is that it forces incompatible changes not only in my codebases, but in every other application developer's codebases worldwide. A small change in GTK+ imposes hundreds of thousands of man-hours of maintenance work upon every application developer. And this burdensome work not only takes time, effort and money, it doesn't improve our applications one iota, and on top of that, it breaks backward compatibility so our code will not longer build with older GTK+ versions. Most of us won't be chasing the latest development release, applications might need to target a wide range of distributions with a wide range of GTK+ versions. So it's a logistical nightmare as well. The lack of concern for the needs of actual application developers is why I eventually had to give up on it entirely. At some point it doesn't make any sense either commercially or for free software development, it's just masochism.

joz1-k 1y ago

Nice to see that someone is still maintaining the original GTK1 toolkit. It's like the classic Win32 UI API for the Linux/Unix. Linux UI libraries are a constantly moving target and one can be easily more occupied by adapting to those toolkit API changes instead of focusing on the features of the application itself. I guess that CinePaint developers decided at some point that they don't want to endure API changes in the UI toolkit anymore. On the other hand, I think GTK1 doesn't even support Unicode.

pferde 1y ago
Yeah, I think GTK2 would be a better candidate to keep maintaining. GTK3 is where it started to go to hell in a handbasket.
- zokier 1y ago
  Gtk2 also had exceptionally long lifetime, initial release in 2002 and last release in 2020. In contrast Gtk1 was initially released in 1998 and last release was 2001.
WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
It doesn't support Unicode, doesn't support font antialiasing, and instead of fontconfig, you need to grapple with X11 core font support, using ttmkfdir and friends, and make the X11 server aware of where the fonts are. It's some experience I definitely don't miss from those days.
- joz1-k 1y ago
  Oh, yes, I remember those early times as well. :) The question is whether it's possible to maintain the legacy API and upgrade the internal architecture to use more modern approaches. I think it's almost always possible, but perhaps the cost to develop and maintain such a legacy layer is too high for an open-source desktop environment and toolkit. The Windows OS managed to support old APIs quite well, but the available resources are incomparable.
- anthk 1y ago

badsectoracula 1y ago

Is it binary backwards compatible with Gtk1.2? AFAICT from the description it seems to be based on Gtk1.2 but it is its own thing. I've being using Gtk 1.2 + patches[0] (which i made by combining the last release with a few patches from Slackware) to occasionally check Lazarus' Gtk1 support. It is also neat if you want to make self-contained binaries, for example this little animation utility i wrote some time ago[1] has a Gtk1-based build with Gtk1 linked statically on it and the tool relying on just X11 and OpenGL. [0] http://runtimeterror.com/pages/badsector/gtk12/ http://runtimeterror.com/pages/badsector/gtk12/ [1] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/piecemod/ http://runtimeterror.com/tools/piecemod/

HexDecOctBin 1y ago

Somewhat tangential: Is there a lightweight distribution of GTK2? I was shopping for a cross-platform GUI library with a C API, and GTK2 seemed like the right choice. But the Windows distribution [1] had 30-40 DLLs and none of them seemed to be optional in DependencyWalker. [1] https://github.com/tschoonj/GTK-for-Windows-Runtime-Environment-Installer https://github.com/tschoonj/GTK-for-Windows-Runtime-Environm...

roschdal 1y ago

GTK1 is the best GTK.

Western0 1y ago

I like GTK but...... small example have error (memory leak) in valgrind

unwind 1y ago
Without further detail, that's not very helpful. GTK doesn't implement garbage collection, you need to clean up by destroying widgets and other resources that you have created. Of course, the operating system will free all resources used by your process when it ends, so that kind of final cleanup is often omitted (and even more so in example code).
- 1718627440 1y ago
  GTK intentionally doesn't calls free, unless some debug symbol is called. This is to prevent trashing before exiting, but is annoying when targeting correctness.
- Western0 1y ago
  show me any example from oficial documentation gtk[1,2,3...] qt etc for no memory leak in valgrind

wer232essf 1y ago

[dead]

zerr 1y ago

Is Glade unmaintained nowadays? The last release is 3 years old.

spookie 1y ago
They're working on something for GTK4 iirc

thedumbname 1y ago

Tried to build on Windows, Mac, Linux: different errors on each platform.

diabllicseagull 1y ago
same here
badsectoracula 1y ago
Judging from the commit history, i get the impression that commits are made regardless of if the library builds or not.

dsijak 1y ago

Ubuntu doesn’t ship libgtk1.2 anymore in standard repositories.

rcarmo 1y ago

I'm so happy to know this exists because every single cross-platform UI toolkit I've used in the past few decades is more complex and weird. (Not that GTK1 can't be complex and weird, more that we've lost the art of creating native GUI toolkits that make sense.)

wallopinski 1y ago
[dead]
OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago
It's mostly because we have different aspects ratios and resolutions now, but also things like accessibility play a role. You're happy to use simple UI toolkits, but you'll very quickly realize it doesn't look good when someone resizes the app
- formerly_proven 1y ago
  Tk usually looks good when resizing the app. Much better than any of the quintuply queued and buffered windows stuff anyhow

itomato 1y ago

I was about to make a Cinepaint joke, but it seems that's already been addressed.

jandrese 1y ago

One thing that GTK lost in the transition to GTK2 was working well over slow Internet connections. I remember how even on a dial up modem you got pretty acceptable performance out of a GTK1 app, so long as it wasn't shoving big bitmaps around. GTK2 on the other hand was always dog slow over remote X connections for no apparent reason.

xantronix 1y ago
You actually hit the nail on the head; pixbuf/pixmap font rendering on the client side rather than X server side text rendering.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Note that on X, client and server are inverted.
  - dpassens 1y ago
    But GP used client and server correctly, no? In the traditional model, the server renders the text it received from the client. Nowadays, the client renders it itself and pushes the whole bitmap to the server.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Pushing the whole bitmap is much slower over dialup, versus a set of commands.
      - dpassens 1y ago
        I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm merely pointing out that you're not disagreeing with GP either.
      - vidarh 1y ago
        Yes? But older X code used to use server side font rendering. The move to client side is the new thing. So this still sounds like the original comment got it right, though I guess ordered in a way that might make it ambiguous.

robinsrowe 1y ago

Thank you! Nice that people care about my work on GTK1. I haven't announced a GTK1 release, so don’t expect it to be stable yet. GTK1 interests me as it is necessary to build retro apps I like. CinePaint being one, and also dozens of other classic GTK apps. A technical reason to care about GTK1 is code size. GTK2 is much larger than GTK1. GTK3 is much larger than GTK2. > it seems to be based on Gtk1.2 but it is its own thing. Yes. Historically, GTK1 was maintained as 3 separate projects across the 3 major operating systems by three different teams, not a single codebase. I created the Windows port. Later I took over the MacOS port that someone had started, but had abandoned before completion. After gtk.org deprecated Linux GTK1, I took on that code, too. As I combine code from different versions of GTK1 from different operating systems, it breaks things. My current effort is to complete integration of the MacOS and Linux code with my Windows code, and remove resultant bugs. > maintain the legacy API and upgrade the internal architecture to use more modern approaches. GTK1 is of a GTK 1.2 flavor plus some enhancements. Yes, I want to smooth off old rough edges, to make GTK1 better with fonts and pixbuffers. > I present you gtkaa [GTK1 anti-aliasing patch] Thank you! Will take a stab at integrating that. I previously integrated the GTK1 dark-mode patch. If there are other interesting GTK1 patches in the archives somewhere, let me know. I’ve heard that gtk.org wasn’t very welcoming to GTK1 patches. > Is there a lightweight distribution of GTK2? Maybe in the future. CinePaint conditionally compiled with GTK1 or GTK2 using an #ifdef. Not a lot of changes to make it build either as GTK1 or GTK2. The GTK2 API broke GTTK1 compatibility in some silly ways. For example, changing the order or arguments in function calls of the same name. Or, making an API that took one call in GTK1 take 2 calls in GTK2, or vice versa. Minor stuff, at least in the calls used by CinePaint. Are other GTK1 apps as easy to port to GTK2 as was CinePaint? I want to add common GTK2 APIs to GTK1 to see how that goes. Doing so would make GTK1 into a very lightweight implementation of the GTK2 API.