https://github.com/onionmixer/LCLGtk4-prototype/tree/main/lazarus/lclBased on the paths and code already included, you can compile and use LCL-GTK4 as is. In fact, I have already built and used it this way on my local machine. (This is also what I mentioned to dbannon above.)
As I noted in another post, I started working on LCL-GTK4 because I didn't realize you were working on LCL-GTK3 with such passion. If I had known LCL-GTK3 would be released this quickly, I would have quietly waited for it instead.
I fully understand how busy you must be right now with revisions for LCL-GTK3. Therefore, I don't want the code I shared to cause you any immediate, additional stress.
Having used Linux desktops for 30 years, I am well aware that GTK4 is not yet fully mature, and even the GIMP team hasn't released a GTK4 version of GIMP yet. This was actually one of my personal motivations for working on LCL-GTK4. Outside of GNOME 4, almost no one is aggressively adopting GTK4, and I agree that this is because GTK4 is still a highly active, fast-changing library.
As noted in my GitHub documentation, the LCL-GTK4 I worked on is tailored to the GTK4 version found in Ubuntu 22.04. This means extra work would be required to support the latest versions of GTK4, which is something I kept in mind while working on it. (I need to stay on Ubuntu 22.04 because I use JACK for occasional MIDI work, and some legacy MIDI applications clash with PipeWire, which was introduced in Ubuntu 24.04 and later. This is the biggest reason I stay on 22.04.) Because of this, I recognize that the current LCL-GTK4 implementation might fall short of what is needed to be merged into the Lazarus mainstream (even though it works perfectly fine for me
).
The only reason I am sharing this incomplete LCL-GTK4 code with the Lazarus community is in the hope that it might save you some trouble whenever you decide to tackle GTK4. As a far better engineer than I am, you already know that LCL-GTK4 requires navigating the architecture across the xlib-gtk4 (and related libraries)-LCL layers. I spent a lot of time repeatedly tracking, fixing, and testing the timing of event propagation required for this setup. This process was frankly not very enjoyable, especially since GTK4 feels so foreign compared to QT5 or GTK2. (It certainly helped me understand why an old friend of mine dislikes GTK4 so much.) If my code can alleviate even a fraction of the painful process you'll face later, my work will have been well worth it.
Of course, you are under absolutely no obligation to reference this code. I am already using it successfully for my own needs (with tomboy-ng), and I entirely respect the decisions of the Lazarus developers. I won't hold the slightest bit of disappointment if it's not used.
https://github.com/onionmixer/gnu-smalltalk-gtk4https://github.com/onionmixer/gnome-commander-gtk4As far as AI-assisted projects go, I already have some experience porting a few projects to GTK4. Those two projects were just things I started purely for fun because the original repositories weren't very active. Lazarus, however, is a different story, which is why I simply wanted to share with the community that "there is also this approach."
To wrap up a rather long message... I repeat that I have absolutely no intention of causing confusion among the Lazarus developers. I hope there is no misunderstanding. I highly respect the Lazarus community and its developers, including you. I just hope this can be viewed as one of many reference examples rather than a source of stress. That is truly all there is to it. If this has caused you any stress, I sincerely apologize.
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