README.md

gtk4-rs

A group of crates that aims to provide complete GTK 4 bindings. This repository contains all the "core" crates of GTK 4.

• GTK
• GDK: An intermediate layer which isolates GTK from the details of the windowing system.
  • GDK Wayland: Wayland backend specific functions.
  • GDK X11: X backend specific functions.
• GSK: An intermediate layer which isolates GTK from the details of the OpenGL or Vulkan implementation.

The GTK 4 crates also depends on other libraries part of the platform like:

• GLib
• Gio
• Graphene
• Cairo
• Pango

Those are common with the GTK 3 and GStreamer bindings and are part of the gtk-rs-core repository.

For more information about each crate, please refer to their README.md file in their directory.

Minimum supported Rust version

Currently, the minimum supported Rust version is 1.57.0.

Documentation

• Examples
• Book Stable / Development
• The Rust API Stable / Development

Useful links

• Website
• Discourse
• Matrix: #rust:gnome.org

Ecosystem

The gtk4-rs repository contains Rust crates for GTK 4. However there is a large ecosystem of GObject libraries and many of these libraries have Rust bindings based on the tooling included in gtk-rs. Of particular note:

• gtk-rs-core - bindings for some of the core libraries such as glib, gio, pango, graphene
• gstreamer-rs - bindings for the GStreamer media framework

Additionally, Rust bindings for various libraries are hosted on GNOME's GitLab instance and can be found at https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Rust.

When using crates that are not part of the gtk4-rs repository, you will need to be careful and ensure that they do not pull in incompatible versions of core crates like glib-rs.

Built with GTK4 Rust bindings

Below is a list of applications built using the Rust bindings of GTK 4

• Solanum
• Shortwave
• Authenticator
• Health
• Video Trimmer

Contributing

The bindings are composed of two parts:

• Automatically generated ones using gir
• Manual parts

The automatic ones can be generated using the generator.py script

python3 ./generator.py

All the crates except gtk4-macros follow this structure

   ./crate 
   ├── Gir.toml
   ├── README.md
   ├── src
   │   ╰── auto
   ├── sys
   ╰── tests

• README.md: Explanations about the crate itself and eventually some details.
• Gir.toml: Used by gir to generate most of the code.
• src: Contains the source code of the crate.
• src/auto: Contains the automatically generated part of the source code.
• sys: Contains the 1:1 bindings of the C API.