GDK
| Original author(s) | GIMP authors |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | The GNOME Project |
| Stable release | 3.90.0 (March 24, 2017) |
| Preview release | 3.89.3 (January 17, 2017) |
| Repository | git |
| Development status | Active |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Linux, OS X, Microsoft Windows |
| Platform | , , others |
| Type | Software library |
| License | GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) |
| Website | developer |
GDK (GIMP Drawing Kit) is a library that acts as a wrapper around the low-level functions provided by the underlying windowing and graphics systems. GDK lies between the display server and the GTK+ library, handling basic rendering such as drawing primitives, raster graphics (bitmaps), cursors, fonts, as well as window events and drag-and-drop functionality.
Like GTK+ Scene Graph Kit (GSK) GDK is part of GTK+ and licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
GTK+ is implemented on top of an abstraction layer called GDK, freeing GTK+ from low-level concerns like input gathering and pixel format conversion.
GDK is an important part of GTK+'s portability. Since low-level cross-platform functionality is already provided by GLib, all that is needed to make GTK+ run on other platforms is to port GDK to the underlying operating system's graphics layer. Hence, the GDK ports to the Windows API and Quartz are what makes GTK+ applications run on Windows and OS X, respectively.
Starting with GTK+ 2.8, GDK supports Cairo which should be used with GTK+ 3 instead of GDK's drawing functions.
GDK is an intermediate layer which isolates GTK+ from the details of the windowing system. GDK is a thin wrapper around Xlib. The X Window System comes with a low-level library called Xlib. Almost every function in GDK is a very thin wrapper around a corresponding Xlib function; but some of the complexity (and functionality) of Xlib is hidden, to simplify programming and to make GDK easier to port to other windowing systems, such as or Microsoft Windows. The concealed Xlib functionality will rarely be of interest to application programmers; for example, many features used solely by window managers are not exposed in GDK.
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