GTK++, stability, and the uncluttered future

I think it's worth to reiterate that "small" and "simple" are relative terms.

an application is "small" or "simple" if it does not have a large quantity of custom widgets that handle presentation in a completely different way than the stock layout managers and widgets provided by the toolkit itself. Gimp, for instance, uses gtk for many of its UI elements, but the large chunk of the UI is built on very custom widgets, which occupy a very small niche of use cases. the example that Benjamin brought was the dockable widget — i.e. a widget capable of containing a set of tool boxes that can be rearranged by drag and drop. while it's a concept used in a certain set of applications, it's highly unlikely that we can add such widget inside gtk, because it would need to satisfy different use cases and then port all the applications using their own custom widget to the new, generic, one.

another point is that both LibreOffice and Firefox don't really use gtk at all, except for integration purposes on Linux. they both have their own toolkit, which may or may not draw something resembling the gtk style.

as the last few cycles of the 3.x branch demonstrates, gtk is getting a wealth of new widgets, as well as new layout managers; if a widget is used by various applications, and it expresses a common UI pattern, then it should definitely be included in the core toolkit.