It’s been an absolute mad dash this cycle porting Builder to GTK 4, but 43.alpha0 is out and available on GNOME Nightly.
Builder is one of the larger applications within GNOME, especially if you include the libraries I had to write and maintain to make that possible. Porting an application to a new toolkit is always a big undertaking. However, it also provides an opportunity to rethink how major components work and simplify them while you’re there.
So that is what has happened this cycle. It’s going to end up being a much more polished product due to the enormous amount of simplification going on.
GTK 4 has simplified how a lot of things work and provided APIs that feel so obvious when you use them. Of course, that also means lots of code needs to be changed (well deleted, mostly). Having focused heavily on using GListModel in previous releases also paid off massively this cycle.
Anyway, here it is. It’s still missing plenty of features as I dash towards the finish line implementing them as quick as I can.
For those that want to test it out, note that our application-id has changed so that you can install Builder’s stable branch and nightly branch side-by-side.
flatpak --user remote-add --if-not-exists gnome-nightly \ https://nightly.gnome.org/gnome-nightly.flatpakrepo flatpak --user install gnome-nightly org.gnome.Builder.Devel
