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GTK ported to Android — here we gooooo! (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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This is very exciting. Here is the APK I downloaded. And the associated discussion.

It even already seems to support stylus input which is very exciting seeing as there has been talk of porting RNote to Android.

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[–] [S] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I definitely recommend using Vala for Gtk as it was tailor made for it. It's built on top of the object system that Gtk uses so the API fits in to the language flawlessly, unlike Rust. It even has its own website for browsing the Gnome APIs https://valadoc.org/

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I read about Vala but a language that compiles to C seemed icky to me. I don't know, maybe it solves all the issues that C has. Maybe I will give it a try one day.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    I think the saving grace is that you never actually see the C (it's piped straight in to GCC), so it might as well not exist. C GObject code has a lot of boilerplate and I like to think that Vala is the programming language that GTK programmers are actually thinking in when they write their C. Vala is essentially a compression of the C code with less room for errors.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Interesting, I didn't realize Vala was designed specifically to help with GTK. It could be a skill issue but I found the entire ecosystem really hard to understand. It's like all documentation is written assuming you already know half of it. "Vala uses the GObject system". Yeah but I'm just deciding which language to use to learn GTK, I don't know what GObject is... Now that I understand it all better I would probably just use Vala and stick to GTK. Instead I switched to Tauri+Leptos+Thaw and it was a joy in comparison. Documentation was clear and I was just able to link my app to local framework code and debug whatever part I wanted. I was able to fix bugs in Tauri in first weeks of learning and I contributed quite a lot along the way.

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