Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

[Alberto Garcia <agarcia igalia com>]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 09:37:46PM +0000, Martyn Russell wrote:

> > seems gtk+'s object model overhead (for example, object method
> > invocation) is too high, especially visible on mobile platforms...
> > it should be possible to optimize to reduce this overhead...
> 
> I agree with Emmanuele.
> Please provide evidence when making wild accusations.

Admittedly the run-time type checking in GObject adds some overhead,
and it's not hard to see g_type_check_instance_is_a() among the most
called functions.

However during my work in Maemo I have *never* seen that being
an actual problem. When there is a performance problem directly
noticeable by the end user the root cause is elsewhere (which may
include, of course, other parts of GTK).

Now, this probably doesn't have much value anymore, but as a funny
side note I even remember back in 2000 or so that a friend of mine
compared the performance of a C-based object system (inspired by GLib)
with that of C++, and -to my surprise back then- found out that the
former was noticeably faster.

Berto