What is the relation between GTK, GTK+ and GTK2?

gtk nomenclature
Tim picture Tim · Apr 29, 2011 · Viewed 11.5k times · Source

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?

Answer

Johannes Sasongko picture Johannes Sasongko · Apr 29, 2011

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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