I only mention WPF because you brought up Win32. If you can acknowledge it is not completely the same then maybe do not bring that up at all. The drawing part of the Win32 API is actually probably closer to Xlib and Xaw than it is to GTK. And those libraries have not really changed in 30 years or so. With some hacking I bet you could get Xaw widgets to display in a GTK4 window.That Joel article is more of a rant than a coherent statement, it is not reasonable to ask developers to stop working on new APIs and libraries.
>None of these are the case with Gtk though.
But this is incorrect, development can continue independently on old versions of GTK.
badsectoracula|3 years ago
I brought up Win32 because it retains backwards compatibility for decades and still gets bug fixes and new features, WPF is as relevant to the discussion as Qt would be.
> The drawing part of the Win32 API is actually probably closer to Xlib and Xaw than it is to GTK.
The Win32 API provides way more functionality than Xlib (Xaw is a separate toolkit and unrelated to Gtk) and is closer to a toolkit like Gtk.
> That Joel article is more of a rant than a coherent statement, it is not reasonable to ask developers to stop working on new APIs and libraries.
What Joel asked (well, he didn't ask, jut put forward) was about wasting developers' time chasing new APIs that do the same things like the old APIs because they are afraid they're going to remain behind and the old APIs will stop getting any form of support or development.
Like what Gtk does to older major versions, basically.
> But this is incorrect, development can continue independently on old versions of GTK.
The entire idea of having an "old version of Gtk" that some 3rd party developer(s) continue on to keep backwards compatibility could only be a possibility because the actual Gtk developers do not care about keeping backwards compatibility.