Setting up a nip2 build environment for newer Windows binaries?

[dnm]

Hello,

I'm looking to set up a build environment to be able to build nip2 with a newer version of VIPS/libvips, e.g., 8.18.0 on Windows. I've poked around a little bit between this repo (libvips/nip2), the main VIPS repo (libvips/libvips), and some build-related repos (libvips/{build-win64-mxe,build-win64,build-win32}), but I had some questions and wasn't sure where the best place to engage the current developers and contributors is or was. Also, I went looking for mailing list information, but didn't come across any, so is it correct to assume everything is done through GitHub Issues?

Thanks in advance!

P.S. I know current development is on nip4, but I've not been able to get a couple of the recently released nip4 Windows binaries to work on my system, hence the interest in being able to update & maintain (perhaps too strong a word here for what I may be able to do, but) nip2.

[jcupitt]

Hi @dnm,

I've been updating it, nip4 is the replacement:

https://github.com/libvips/nip4

There's a "nip4 for nip2 users" running over the main differences:

https://www.libvips.org/2025/03/12/nip4-for-nip2-users.html

And there are win binaries in the releases tab:

https://github.com/libvips/nip4/releases

It should load all nip2 workspaces correctly (hopefully). I'm hoping to launch it properly at a conference in May next year.

[dnm]

Hi @dnm,

I've been updating it, nip4 is the replacement:

https://github.com/libvips/nip4

There's a "nip4 for nip2 users" running over the main differences:

https://www.libvips.org/2025/03/12/nip4-for-nip2-users.html

And there are win binaries in the releases tab:

https://github.com/libvips/nip4/releases

It should load all nip2 workspaces correctly (hopefully). I'm hoping to launch it properly at a conference in May next year.

Hello!

Sorry, I think we just collided with overlapping edits/posts. I was just updating (via an edit) my previous post when I saw yours (quoted above) pop into the page. Apologies for the collision!

[jcupitt]

Oh, strange! What's not working with the nip4 binary?

nip2 is really quite hard to build now. I don't really want to attempt it myself, though of course you're welcome to try.

I'd fork build-win64-mxe, then start trying to get gtk2 to build. You'll probably need to do some patching.

[dnm]

Oh, strange! What's not working with the nip4 binary?

nip2 is really quite hard to build now. I don't really want to attempt it myself, though of course you're welcome to try.

I'd fork build-win64-mxe, then start trying to get gtk2 to build. You'll probably need to do some patching.

Your guess is likely far better than mine. Here's an attempt at capturing what I'm seeing rendered to an animated GIF. There's a short delay after I start nip4 (in this instance, I'm running it from the command line, but that command line prompt isn't captured in the bounding box of the recording I made here), and then it draws the UI to the screen, but, as you can (hopefully) see here, not entirely... correctly.

I'm on an old version of Windows 10, mostly due to other software's support needs.

Hope this helps, and please don't hesitate to let me know if there's something else I should try, or some other steps I could perform with nip4 to try and gather more information for you.

Thanks again!

[jcupitt]

That looks like a problem with the renderer. gtk4 recently switched to vulkan as the default backend, maybe your win10 has a GPU driver with buggy vulkan?

You can experiment with:

https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/running.html#gsk_renderer

Try starting nip4 with something like:

$ GSK_RENDERER=cairo nip4

That'll make it use the fallback CPU rendering path, which is slow, but should work everywhere.

(you might need to use something like git-bash to set an env var for a command, I'm a bit unsure about windows)

[dnm]

I can confirm that this works for me (at least in terms of getting the UI to draw in properly):

As shown in the animated GIF above, on Windows I just did the following at a command prompt (in my particular example above, I'm using Yori, but this works with the stock Windows Command Prompt as well):

set GSK_RENDERER=cairo
nip4

Thanks very much for the tip (and the pointer to the GTK4 docs)!

I may still try to build nip2 with a newer version of VIPS/libvips, but we'll see. Understood that this is unsupported and I'm "on my own" in a sense if I go that route. I'll experiment with nip4 as well.

Re: the questions about mailing lists, etc., or lack thereof, are GitHub Issues the preferred method of collaboration on VIPS/libvips, nip4, etc.?

Thanks again!

[jcupitt]

Great! I'll add a note to the nip4 README (and vipsdisp I suppose) in case anyone else runs into this.

We use github discussions for libvips to keep the volume on issues down, but tyhe other projects just have everything on issues, since traffic isn't usually too high.

[jcupitt]

It might be worth trying GSK_RENDERER=opengl as well, it's probably safer than Vulkan and will be much faster than cairo.

There's also a web browser backend (!!) so you can use nip2 over the web, but that will be even slower than cairo.

[dnm]

It might be worth trying GSK_RENDERER=opengl as well, it's probably safer than Vulkan and will be much faster than cairo.

I did try this (after trying your suggestion of the Cairo backend) after taking a look at the GTK4 documentation link you provided, but at least for me it exhibited the same behavior as before. I didn't dig into it any further, at least as of yet.

[kleisauke]

GTK was recently updated from 4.18.6 to 4.20.3 with commit libvips/build-win64-mxe@d8c2152, so it might be worth rebuilding nip4 with that.

Note to self: look into packaging https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Headers, https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Loader and https://github.com/google/shaderc in build-win64-mxe. Once done, we'll be able to build with -Dvulkan=enabled.