GTK hackfest, 2026 edition (GTK Development Blog)

Matthias Clasen has published a short summary of the GTK hackfest held prior to FOSDEM2026. Topics includediscussions on unstable APIs, a decision to bump the C runtimerequirement to C11 in the next development cycle, limiting changes inGTK3 to crash and build fixes, as well as the state ofaccessibility:

On the accessibility side, we are somewhat worried about the stateof AccessKit. Thecode upstream is maintained, but we haven't seen movement in the GTKimplementation. We still default to the AT-SPI backend on Linux, butAccessKit is used on Windows and macOS (and possibly Android in thefuture); it would be nice to have consumers of the accessibility stacklooking at the code and issues.

On the AT-SPI side we are still missing proper feature negotiationin the protocol; interfaces are now versioned on D-Bus, but there's nomechanism to negotiate the supported set of roles or events betweentoolkits, compositors, and assistive technologies, which makes runningnewer applications on older OS versions harder.