I’ve been busy the past few months writing a new GDK backend for macOS when not maintaining my other projects. Historically our macOS performance wasn’t something to rave about. But it’s getting better in GTK 4.
The new backend can do both software rendering with Cairo and hardware-based OpenGL rendering using the same OpenGL renderer as we use on GNU/Linux.
This was a fairly substantial “greenfield” rewrite of the backend because so much of it had bit-rotted during the development of GTK 4. GDK hardly looks the same as it did in previous releases and that is a good thing. It’s much easier to write a new backend these days.
I tried to polish it off a bit too, teaching it to do CSD edge-snapping and more. If you’re unfortunate enough to be using the software renderer, it does have some tricks to make drawing a bit faster than in the past. We dropped our use of the quartz Cairo backend in favor of the image backend because, well, it’s faster. Additionally we get a bit clever with opaque regions to speed up CSD compositing.
It also uses the CVDisplayLink to get presentation timing information from the display server to drive our frame clock.
Thanks again to my employer, Red Hat, for funding this work so we can all benefit from having our applications reach more users.