halting problem

Last week, Igalia finally announced Moonforge, a project we’ve been working on for basically all of 2025.

How do things happen in GNOME?

tl;dr The introspection data for GLib (and its sub-libraries) is now generated by GLib itself instead of gobject-introspection; and in the near future, libgirepository is going to be part of GLib as well.

The GObject type system has been serving the GNOME community for more than 20 years.

One of the things I’ve been recently working on at Igalia is the desktop portals implementation, the middleware layer of API for application and toolkit developers that allows sandboxed applications to interact with the host system.

First of all, you should go on the gobject-introspection website and read the page on how to write bindable API.

Okay, I can’t believe I have to do this again.

In the beginning… In 1997, I downloaded my first MP3 file.

Today I released libgweather-3.90.0, the first developers snapshot of GWeather 4: Behold!

tl;dr Libgweather, the small GNOME library that queries weather services, is getting a major version bump to allow applications using it to be ported to GTK4.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a GObject class in possession of a property, must be in want of an accessor function.

The main function of library-web, the tool that published the API reference of the various GNOME libraries, was to take release archives and put their contents in a location that would be visible to a web server.

You may have just now noticed that the GNOME developers documentation website has changed after 15 years.

The type system at the base of our platform, GType, has various kinds of derivability: simple derivability, where you’re allowed to create your derived version of an existing type, but you cannot derive your type any further; deep derivability, where you’…

It’s been nearly a month since I’ve talked about gi-docgen, my little tool to generate API references from introspection data.

Back in the late ‘90s, people working on GTK had the exact same problem we have today: how do we document the collection of functions, types, macros, and assorted symbols that we call “an API”.

Let us assume we are writing a library.

Five years (and change) ago I was looking at the data types and API that were needed to write a 3D-capable scene graph API; I was also learning about SIMD instructions and compiler builtins on IA and ARM, as well as a bunch of math I didn’t really study in

Back in March, I wrote about µTest, a Behavior-Driven Development testing API for C libraries, and that I was planning to use it to replace the GLib testing API in Graphene.

One of the great advantages of moving the code hosting in GNOME to GitLab is the ability to run per-project, per-branch, and per-merge request continuous integration pipelines.

Years ago I started writing Graphene as a small library of 3D transformation-related math types to be used by GTK (and possibly Clutter, even if that didn’t pan out until Georges started working on the Clutter fork inside Mutter).

In the GNOME project community, the people building the code are represented by two separate but equally important groups: the maintainers, who release the code, and the release team, who release GNOME.

For all intents and purposes, the 2.0 release process of GNOME was a reboot of the project; as such, it was a highly introspective event that just so happened to result in a public release of a software platform used by a large number of people.

In the beginning of the year 2000, with the 1.2 release nearly out of the door, the GNOME project was beginning to lay down the groundwork for the design and development of the 2.0 release cycle.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the History of GNOME!

It’s almost the end of the year, so it’s time for a recap of the previous episodes, I guess.

First of all, I’d like to apologise for the lateness of this episode.

Back in episode 1.1 and 1.2 we talked a bit about “language bindings” as a resource available to GNOME application developers that did not want to deal with C as the programming language for their projects.

The history of the GNOME project is also the history of its core development platform.

With version 1.2 released, and the Foundation, well, founded, the GNOME community was free to spend its time on planning the next milestones for the project, namely: the last release of the 1.x cycle, and the first of the 2.x one.

As is the case of many free and open source software projects, GNOME’s planning and discussions mostly happen online, on a variety of mediums, like IRC, mailing lists, and issue trackers.

With the GNOME 1.0 release, and the initial endorsement of the project by Linux distributors like Red Hat and Debian, it was only a matter of time before a commercial ecosystem would start to coalesce around the GNOME project.

The year is 1998.

I’ve done a thing which may be of interest if you’re following the GNOME community.

It is a long running joke in the GNOME community, that the acronym, or, more accurately, the backronym, that serves as the name of the project does not apply any more.

Prologue History is one of my passions; more than offering a narrative of the past, it gives us context, and with context comes a better understanding of the people that made history, and of their choices.

Episode 0: Prologue What Why Who How Chapter 1: Perfection, achieved Episode 1.1: The GNU Network Object Model Environment Linux and Unix X11, and the desktop landscape KDE and the Qt licensing GNU Image Manipulation Program GTK Guile and language bindings

Reference counting is a fairly common garbage collection technique used in many projects; the core GNOME platform uses pretty much all the time, from container data types, to GObject.

This is something of a frequently asked question, as it comes up every once in a while.

The Recipes application started as a celebration of GNOME’s community and history, and it’s grown to be a great showcase for what GNOME is about: design guidelines and attention to detail a software development platform for modern applications new technol…

You can safely skip this article if you’re not building software using enumeration types and signal handlers; or if you’re already using Meson.

Another year, another GUADEC — my 13th to date.

In his talk at the 2017 GUADEC in Manchester, Richard Brown presented a set of objections to the current trend of new packaging systems — mostly AppImage, Snap, and Flatpak — from the perspective of a Linux distribution integrator.

Meson is definitely getting more traction in GNOME (and other projects), with many components adding support for it in parallel to autotools, or outright switching to it.

It seems I raised a bit of a stink on Twitter last week: PSA: if you want to write a new @gnome application, don't use Vala; if you're already using it, consider porting to a non-dead language. — Emmanuele Bassi (@ebassi) February 3, 2017 Of course, and w…

Epoxy is a small library that GTK+, and other projects, use in order to access the OpenGL API in somewhat sane fashion, hiding all the awful bits of craziness that actually need to happen because apparently somebody dosed the water supply at SGI with large

Last year I talked about the newly added support for Apple’s Visual Format Language in Emeus, which allows to quickly describe layouts using a cross between ASCII art and predicates.

Dell XPS 13 (Developer Edition 2016) After three and a half years with my trusty mid-2013 MacBook Air, I decided to get a new personal laptop.