gtk4.0

[Gunter Königsmann]

Dear all,

In a news entry it was proposed that someone could ask an AI to port
wxWidgets to GTK4.

Don't know if that was meant seriously - but if yes:
https://github.com/gunterkoenigsmann/wxWidgets/tree/claude/gtk4-wxwidgets-port-plan-pwo52u
compiles, passes most of its tests by bow, - and since both CIlaude and
me haven't ever looked if it even produces windows nor if it fills them
with any contents that makes sense it most probably won't, currently.
Actually Claude states that we still have a long way to go
(https://github.com/gunterkoenigsmann/wxWidgets/blob/claude/gtk4-wxwidgets-port-plan-pwo52u/docs/gtk/gtk4-status.md).
Next week when I have new tokens for Claude I'll ask it to fix the last
test suite errors, run it under the address sanitizer and start testing.

Still no guarantee if the result will ever be usable, but wanted to
inform you that this try was started.

An executive summary of the port's status can be found at:
https://github.com/gunterkoenigsmann/wxWidgets/blob/claude/gtk4-wxwidgets-port-plan-pwo52u/docs/gtk/gtk4-upstream-summary.md

Kind regards,

       Gunter.

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Tue, 18 Aug 2026 07:29:27 +0200 'Gunter Königsmann' via wx-users wrote:

GK> In a news entry it was proposed that someone could ask an AI to port
GK> wxWidgets to GTK4.
GK>
GK> Don't know if that was meant seriously - but if yes:
GK> https://github.com/gunterkoenigsmann/wxWidgets/tree/claude/gtk4-wxwidgets-port-plan-pwo52u

I'm not actually sure who proposed this and where but, in principle, if a
LLM can do what we have failed to do since quite a few years, I'm not going
to refuse it. However the problem is that someone would still need to
maintain the resulting code base and if this someone is to be me, I'd need
to understand how it works.

GK> Still no guarantee if the result will ever be usable, but wanted to
GK> inform you that this try was started.

AFAICS from this repository it didn't tackle any of real issues yet, or
did it? Notably I see

> Window/child structure — this is the real hard problem

and I agree, and would like to know how is it going to be solved. Normally
I'd say "let's discuss this on wx-dev" but I'm not sure how to collaborate
with LLMs... Let me at least cc this to wx-dev (sorry in advance to people
who will have seen it twice) and let's continue this discussion there.

BTW, if we believe what it generated, painting might not be a problem at
all, which would be great news. But I didn't check it.

Regards,
VZ

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