14 DAY TRIAL // One day after the release of the GNOME 3.24 Beta desktop environment, the developers behind the GNOME Builder IDE (Integrated Development Environment) announced the release of a first Beta build towards the next major version of the application.
Today's Beta milestone (technical version number is 3.23.90) is also the first development release of GNOME Builder 3.24, which means that we can finally get a taste of what's coming next in the IDE. We already told you last year in December that it would bring Flatpak support, but let's find out what's new in this Beta.
"We've been hard at work this cycle turning Builder upside down and replacing the build engine. We now have a new build pipeline that allows for much more flexibility for build systems and runtimes. There is certainly a bit of fallout from this, but with your help testing, we can have these bugs shook out by final release," said the devs.
Here's what's new in GNOME Builder 3.24 Beta
According to the internal changelog (attached below for your reading pleasure), GNOME Builder 3.24 comes with great improvements to the Meson support so you can finally build Flatpak runtimes, the XML plugin, which now includes a symbol resolver, as well as a new beautifier plugin that lets devs clean their source code using various tools.
Hyperlinks are now supported by the terminal plugin, you can finally use either the CMake or Ninja build systems for building your projects, a new style was implemented to the symbol tree to make it easier to browse things, and it looks like semantic spellchecking is now supported in GNOME Builder with strings and comments.
The list of new features continues with IdeBuildPipeline, a component that makes it possible for various plugins to hook stages into the pipeline, support for colored output in the build panel, as well as build pipeline support for numerous plugins, including flatpak, ninja, cmake, jhbuild, cargo, autotools, and meson.
Some Vim emulation improvements are also present in this first Beta release of GNOME Builder 3.24, along with support for automatically downloading Flatpak runtimes through the new transfers manager, and the ability to abstract configurations via ConfigurationProviders to provide config files in plugins.
Last but not least, the build-tools plugin was moved to libide, a race condition related to CFLAGS was addressed, a custom TMPDIR is now used for ctags when there's need for the creation of larger files, and it's now possible for GNOME Builder's plugins to register files that are ignored in the project tree. You can download GNOME Builder 3.24 Beta right now from our website if you want to take it for a test drive.