We (the gtkmm developers) have started work on an ABI-breaking gtkmm-4.0, as well as an ABI-breaking glibmm, target GTK+ 4, and letting us clean up some cruft that has gathered over the years. These install in parallel with the existing gtkmm-3.0 and glibmm-2.4 APIs/ABIs.

A couple of days ago I released first versions of glibmm (2.51.1) and gtkmm (3.89.1), as well as accompanying pangomm and atkmm releases.

This also lets us use my rewrite of libsigc++ for libsigc++-3.0, bringing us more fully into the world of “modern C++”. We might use this opportunity to make other fundamental changes, so now is the time to make suggestions.

We did a parallel-installing ABI-breaking glibmm even though glib isn’t doing that. That’s because, now that GTK+ is forcing us to do it for gtkmm, this seems like as good a time as any to do it for glibmm too. It’s generally harder to maintain C++ ABIs than C ABIs, largely because C++ is just more complicated and its types are more exactly specified. For instance we’d never have been able to switch to libsigc++-3.0 without breaking ABI.