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Changes in 4.0
The primary goal of Processing 4.0 is to keep your code running for a long time. Between new OS updates and restrictions, hardware changes, and the shifting Java platform and its licensing, it's necessary to make significant modifications behind the scenes.
We've moved to a new repository for the 4.0 release so that we could cull a lot of the accumulated mess of the last 20 years. This made git clone (and most other git operations) a lot faster.
For a detailed list of changes relevant to developers working on this repository, and changes that may impact Library, Mode, or Tool development, please refer to CHANGELOG.md. The full list of changes can be seen in the release notes for each version.
Processing 4 has important updates that prepare the platform for its future. Most significantly, this includes the move to Java 17 as well as major changes to the range of platforms we support (Apple Silicon! Raspberry Pi on 32- and 64-bit ARM!)
With any luck, many changes should be transparent to most users, in spite of how much is updated behind the scenes. More immediately visible changes include major work on the UI, including “themes” and the ability to change how sketches are named by default.
As with all releases, we did everything possible to avoid breaking API. However, there were still tweaks that we had to make. We tried to keep them minor. Our goal is stability, and keeping everyone's code running.
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Visit Tools → Theme Selector to choose a color theme. We like how this helps the environment feel more personal. You can also customize them yourself! More details here.
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Not fond of the default
sketch_220809anaming system? You can also select an alternate naming scheme in the Preferences window. It's also possible to create your own word list for generating sketch names. -
We've added a new
windowRatio()command that helps automatically resize your sketches whenever the window size changes. Youn can read about it in the release notes for beta 7, but a reference page is coming soon. -
There's a new Movie Maker tool (based on ffmpeg) that can create animated GIFs as well as high-resolution lossless MPEG videos. Visit Tools → Movie Maker to try it out.
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Apple Silicon is now supported (and very speedy!)
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Sketch folder restrictions have been relaxed, making it easier to use version control. By default, the name of the main tab and the sketch folder will be kept in sync as with previous versions of Processing. But you can turn this off by visiting the Preferences window.
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Many, many changes have been made to future-proof the software, like using Java 17.
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Processing 4.0 also includes hundreds of bug fixes and usability updates. You can see the gory details in the revisions document.
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The move to Java 17 instead of Java 8 is a significant shift, and may cause things to break. We've done our best to minimize that! For most people, it will seem like nothing is different.
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If you're using the
FX2Drenderer, you'll need to use Sketch → Import Library to add the JavaFX library to your sketch. Newer JavaFX releases are significantly larger, so we had to make it an optional library. -
It is possible that some Library, Mode, or Tool contributions won't work with this release. You may want to use a separate sketchbook folder for your Processing 4 projects, so that you can install Libraries, Modes, and Tools that you know will work properly.
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There is no 32-bit support, except for on the Raspberry Pi. The supported platforms will be Windows 10 (64-bit), Linux (Ubuntu 20.04, 64-bit), and macOS Big Sur and Monterey.
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Please, please, please use the 4.0 release. It's drastically better, and we don't have time to support 3.x as well. If you run into problems, let us know and we'll try to fix it.
Click here for detailed information about the revisions between each of the 4.0 alpha and beta releases.
You can also read about the changes in 3.x, or changes in 2.x and earlier.