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I'm confused by the GTK terminology. According to Wikipedia, there seem to be bindings to GTK+ that are called GTK (GtkAda) and GTK2 (gtk2hs, Gtk2-Perl).
Could someone clear this up for me?
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GNOME is a desktop environment that uses GTK+ as its GUI toolkit.
The development of GTK 4 used version names 3.90, 3.92, etc. until the first GTK 4.0 stable release was launched in December 2020. Despite the first stable GTK 4 release, some applications using GTK still rely on GTK 2. For example, as of January 2022, GIMP is still being ported to GTK 3.
The OS is backward compatible with old applications that continue to run. The old applications are forward compatible with newer versions of the operating system including some of the new features that are added.
GTK is commonly and incorrectly thought to stand for "GNOME ToolKit", but is actually stands for "GIMP ToolKit" because it was first created to design an user interface for GIMP. GTK is an object-oriented toolkit written in C (GTK itself is not a language).
The first incarnation of the project was called GTK (which stood for GIMP Toolkit).
At some very early point, while the project was still part of The GIMP (and before version 1.0), it was renamed to GTK+. Despite this, people often referred to it as GTK out of convenience or ignorance.
The GTK+ name was used for more than 20 years through versions 1.x, 2.x, and 3.x, but the "GIMP Toolkit" expansion was dropped. I don't know when exactly this happened but perhaps during the 1.x → 2.x transition.
There is nothing officially called GTK2. It's just what some people call the 2.x series of GTK+.
On 2019-02-06, the project was renamed back to GTK, which will affect version 4.0 onwards.
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GTK/GTK+ and GTK2 are different versions of the same API. GTK is an old, deprecated version, GTK2 is the previous one, GTK+ 3/GTK3 is the current version.
GTK+ is the correct name of the old API, but most people just call it GTK.
The C++ bindings for GTK+ are part of the project GTKmm.
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