Re: why so few themes are shipped with gnome-1.4?

[Iain <tigermilk btinternet com>]

> > My experience has been that the bulk of the slowness comes from poor
> > memory management with imlib.  Pixmap themes seem to chew up all available
> > memory.  I think with modern compilers and graphics hardware there isn't
> > much point in writing asm blitters, especially with the broken memory
> > managment.
> > 
> > I would advocate fixing/reimplementing the pixmap theme to use pixbuf and
> > to have considerable effort put into minimising the memory usage.  Not
> > that I'm offering...  It would be a good project though.
> 
>  I have an impression that scaling pixmaps (very common task required for
> pixmap engine) is very time consuming and that writing it using MMX for x86
> will gain some performance boost. So, I don't think that bad MM is that
> guilty. Though I didn't profile of course.


One reason why it is so slow is that it redraws everything 3 times.
On a slow machine, make a button that is huge, like the size of the
screen, and then with the pixmap theme on make it refresh. You can watch
it blink as it gets redrawn each time.

Owen has already wrtten the pixmap engine to use GdkPixbuf, but then he
rewrote it so that it would only work for Gtk2. But when I had it for
Gtk1.2 it was much faster than the Imlib version.

iain