gtk-fortran 4.0 released

[MAGNIN Vincent]

gtk-fortran 4.0 released
--------------------

The gtk-fortran project (https://github.com/vmagnin/gtk-fortran/wiki) is
now ten years old. Its birth can be tracked down to that
comp.lang.fortran discussion
(https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.fortran/c/ACQyhxfzjrk) starting
on the 27th December 2010 15:28:35 where I especially met Jerry DeLisle.
We started working with GTK 2, as GTK 3 was released only in February
2011. Nearly ten years later, GTK 4.0 was released on Christmas 2020.
Concerning gtk-fortran, the preparatory work began in the gtk3 branch on
the 24th January 2020. And just after a gtk-3-fortran release in April,
the gtk4 development branch was created on the 7th May 2020. We are now
~370 commits later. See the CHANGELOG file
(https://github.com/vmagnin/gtk-fortran/blob/gtk4/CHANGELOG.md) for a
summary of the new features since the April 2020 release, and the GTK
Development Blog (https://blog.gtk.org/) to know more about the numerous
changes in GTK 4.

Starting with that 4.0 release, gtk-fortran will follow a classical
semantic versioning (instead of following the GTK or Ubuntu versions):
gtk-fortran 4.0 is based on GTK 4.2 and GLib 2.68. The GTK 4 library is
progressively arriving in all systems: Ubuntu 21.04, Fedora 33 & 34,
Alpine Linux, ALT Linux Sisyphus, Arch Linux, KaOS, Mageia 8, NetBSD
9.1, OpenMandriva Rolling, openSUSE Tumbleweed. But concerning Debian,
it is still in the experimental branch. Concerning Windows, GTK 4 is
available in MSYS2.

The wiki documentation has now a Tutorials
(https://github.com/vmagnin/gtk-fortran/wiki/Tutorials) page with two
tutorials. A page about the Python wrapper used to generate gtk-fortran
(https://github.com/vmagnin/gtk-fortran/wiki/How-gtk-fortran-is-generated)
has also been added.

The roadmap for 2021 is:
- to improve the documentation and write tutorials, update the High
Level library documentation for GTK 4.
- Jerry is exploring what the OOP features of Fortran could bring to
gtk-fortran.
- We will explore coarrays: is it possible to use them in a gtk-fortran
program? We hope so, as the GUI could be handled by only the first image.
- We also hope that gtk-fortran could become an fpm package: see
https://github.com/vmagnin/gtk-fortran/issues/229.

Finally, note that the gtkf-sketcher tool has only been partially ported
to GTK 4, as an essential API for that tool disappeared from GTK 4.
Anyway, Glade (http://glade.gnome.org/) is not yet ported to GTK 4.

gtk-fortran 3.24.28 released
--------------------

We have also made a new release in the gtk3 branch, with GTK 3.24.28 and
GLib 2.68. All the improvements included in gtk-fortran 3.24.28 (gtk3
branch) are also in gtk-fortran 4.0. GTK 3 itself is of course not
evolving anymore and now just receives bug fixes.

Note that the packages names are gtk-3-fortran and gtk-4-fortran:
installing both libraries on your machine is not a problem.