Matthias Clasen shared an update today concerning the state of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) within GNOME’s GTK toolkit.
With the upcoming GTK 4.22 toolkit release, the SVG support is in rather good shape with GtkSvg thanks to the work of Clasen and others. Since last year Clasen has been leading work on an SVG renderer in GTK to offer robust built-in SVG capabilities for icons and more. This work has also involved updating many of the symbolic icons in GNOME.
While GtkSvg is in good shape for GTK 4.22, not every SVG icon is using it yet and that will be a focus for the follow on development cycle.
“GtkSvg will be available in GTK 4.22, but we will not use it for every SVG icon yet — we still have a much simpler symbolic icon parser which is used for icons that are looked up by icon name from an icontheme. Switching over to using GtkSvg for everything is on the agenda for the next development cycle, after we’ve convinced ourselves that we can do this without adverse effects on performance or resource consumption of apps.
Ongoing improvements of our rendering infrastructure will help ensure that that is the case.”
More details as to this 2026 state of SVG within the GTK toolkit via the GTK blog.
