Note
"It's been X days/weeks/months since last commit, is this project still maintained?" Yes, I'm just busy with my job :)
A set of diverse GTK examples written in different programming languages.
Please read this section before doing anything :)
To get started, clone this repository and then make sure you have the following things on your development environment:
- Development files for GTK 3 and GTK 4
- libepoxy (required for the C GtkGLArea examples)
- Meson (required to build the C, C++ and Vala examples)
- gtkmm (required for the C++ examples, make sure to get the versions for GTK 3 and GTK 4)
- lgi (required for the Lua examples)
- gobject-introspection (required for the Lua examples [and perhaps Python and Zig too])
- PyGObject (required for the Python examples)
- PyOpenGL (required for the Python Gtk.GLArea example)
Of course, you'll also need the tooling for the languages of your choice:
- C/C++ compiler (GCC or Clang)
- Lua
- Python 3
- Vala compiler
- Zig compiler
I believe most (if not all) of these requirements can be easily found in the package manager of your choice, so hopefully, everything should be easy to set up.
Of course, you may not want to try all of the examples in this repository, so getting all of these dependencies could be pointless, and thankfully, you can freely skip the gobject-introspection, Lua, Python and Zig dependencies with no problem.
Now, for libepoxy and gtkmm, you'll need to edit the root meson.build file and comment out the lines in which these dependencies are declared. Basically, something like this:
# For this example, I'm disabling the gtkmm dependencies only
# gtkmm3 = dependency('gtkmm-3.0', required: true)
# gtkmm4 = dependency('gtkmm-4.0', required: true)Perhaps, setting required to false might also work, but there's a chance the meson command will fail to setup the project.
Additionally, you'll also need to comment out some subdir function calls in the same file, see the section below for that.
Once you got everything ready, you should be able to proceed like this:
meson setup build
ninja -C buildAfter that, you should a bunch of binaries under the build/ folder.
As you might have noticed, the C, C++ and Vala examples are all built together, but there's a chance that you might want build only certain examples. For example: C++ GTK 3, C GTK 4, and so on.
In that case, you could try commenting out the subdir function calls in the root meson.build file. For example, this will only set up the Lua examples:
# subdir('c/gtk3')
# subdir('c/gtk4')
# subdir('cpp/gtk3/oop')
# subdir('cpp/gtk3/procedural')
# subdir('cpp/gtk4/oop')
# subdir('cpp/gtk4/procedural')
subdir('lua/gtk3')
subdir('lua/gtk4')
# subdir('vala/gtk3')
# subdir('vala/gtk4')There's even a way to build only singular Meson/Ninja targets, but I don't quite remember at the moment.
If you don't know any of Meson, I recommend checking out their website or you could ask the LLM of your choice and it should be able to give you a competent answer.
As long as you have Lua 5.1+ and lgi, you should be able to run these examples with no problem.
You'll notice that some Lua examples are .in files, those require you to run the meson tool first, just as explained in the sections above. The only difference is that the ninja step won't be necessary.
If the GTK 4 examples don't work, you might need the git version of lgi, which requires you to clone the repository and build lgi by yourself.
Note
To build lgi you'll need gobject-introspection, check out the lgi's repository for details.
Whatever version of Python 3 you have should work. PyGObject is the main dependency to run these examples, PyOpenGL is only needed for the Gtk.GLArea example as previously mentioned, you should be able to identify the correct file immediately.
If you cloned this repository without the --recurse-submodules flag, you'll need to run this before continuing:
git submodules update --init --recursiveOnce that finishes, you can run:
zig buildAfter that, check out the zig/zig-out/bin/ folder for the binaries.
Note
On Linux: zig build command could fail if you don't have OpenGL on your system. I highly doubt that could happen, but I wanted to leave the note anyways because the GtkGLArea example loads OpenGL using dlopen, so please keep that in mind.
GTK 4 is a huge jump from GTK 3 that came with many changes in the API, deprecating some classes and adding new ones. For that reason, not all GTK 3 examples are available in GTK 4 (and the other way around). Of course, I'll try to have the same examples in both GTK versions, but I can't guarantee all of them will be available. For more details on this, check out this list, which contains all the GTK 4 classes and indicates which ones are deprecated in GTK 4.
This repository is a merge of all my previous repositories that had GTK examples. At some point I decided to do this simply because I wanted a centralized place to have all this code and to keep things organized.