14 DAY TRIAL // As part of last week's Beta 2 milestone of the forthcoming and highly anticipated GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, the development team behind the GNOME Builder IDE released a new Beta version.
GNOME Builder 3.23.91 is the second Beta development build towards the major 3.24 release of the open-source IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that lets application developers create the most powerful apps for the GNOME desktop. And as you can see from the changelog attached at the end of the article, it includes lots of improvements, new features, and bug fixes.
The most prominent one is the out-of-the-box Flatpak support, which has been greatly stabilized in this release so that you can package your apps as Flatpaks with ease and without any hiccups. There are also various improvements for the Meson build system when running under Flatpak, and the Flatpak plugin was updated to no longer try to build a project from the "/run/build/$project" location.
"The Flatpak plugin no longer tries to build your project from /run/build/$project due to breaking mtime and general difficulty in keeping things consistent between subprocess executions. This has the side-effect of reducing the predictability of source location in debug symbols. But as flatpak-builder should be used for release builds, this seems fine," explain the developers.
Transfer engine improvements, Omnibar styling changes, lots more
As mentioned before, GNOME Builder 3.24 promises to be a major release, and it proved that during its entire development cycle. This second Beta version comes with improvements for the transfer engine and the Omnibar styling, new keyboard tooltips, simplified init scripts for autogen-based projects, as well as the ability to search the code within the terminal by using the Ctrl+Shift+F keyboard shortcut.
There are also various JSON-RPC improvements for language server communication, a new Valgrind plugin that can be used for leak tracking when testing your apps, support for opening a new terminal inside the current build runtime by using the Ctrl+Alt+Shift+T keyboard shortcut, some more improvements to the workbench UI, and new documentation that's also available online at https://builder.readthedocs.io.
Some more source beautifiers were added, especially for makefiles, and this second Beta release of GNOME Builder 3.24 resolves some memory leaks, adds a workaround for a GObject type system deadlock, removes the glibmm, gtkmm and libidemm dependencies, fixes PTY fd ownership for RustUp, and updates makecache to also handle out-of-order responses from make.
The Sysprof-based profiler that ships with GNOME Builder was also updated, and it's now capable of profiling Flatpaks or any other app launched inside of mount-namespace. The file search functionality should now be able to ignore white-spaces, and you can select any project type using the default file filter from the Open Project dialog. Download GNOME Builder 3.24 Beta 2 right now from our website.