Re: Am I wasting my time with the "pixmap" theme engine ?

[otaylor redhat com]

"Tim Betts" <tbetts nortelnetworks com> writes:

> Thanks Bruce for your help.
 
> Even assuming the next super cool version of GTK+ includes this as
> part of the big double-buffering effort, I may still need to do it
> so that I don't have to upgrade to the new version right away and
> due to some special customization and needs of my client
> application.
>
> Can Owen or Havoc tell us definatively whether or not the next
> version of GTK+ includes this, or whether a patch will become
> available for GTK+1.2.7, etc.,

 - GTK+-2.0 will definitely include the new drawing code and new theme
   engine code that the current gdk-pixbuf engine requires.

 - Porting the improvements to GTK+-1.2.x (current is 1.2.8) would
   be many months work and simply not make much sense. 

> that will do it ? This answer could potentially save me so much effort and I
> could spend my time on planning to upgrade to the next version rather than
> satisfying one of my end-users requirements. Thanks in advance for the answer.
>
> If not, can anyone give me any nice pointers to achieving killer drawing
> performance, when converting the "pixmap" theme engine from GdkImLib to
> GdkPixbuf. I already have some code, but it's probably not very optimal in
> relation to how GdkGC's, GdkPixmap's and GdkBitmap's are needed and used after
> I have loaded the initial GdkPixbuf into memory.

Well, if you are going to work on converting the pixmap engine in a
pixbuf engine, you really should start with my GdkPixbuf engine for
GTK+-2.0 and backport it to gtk+-1.0, rather than trying to start from
scratch.

Of course, other than code cleanliness and maintainability, the
real improvements come from:

 a) more efficient redrawing code in GTK+-2.0
 b) the double buffering code in GTK+-2.0.

And these improvements can't be backported to GTK+-1.2; they are
fundementally tied to improvements in the way that GDK works.

GDK-2.0 has not yet been optimized at all yet for drawing performance,
and there are some needed fixes to the gdk-pixbuf scaling code so the
new pixbuf engine isn't blazingly fast on GTK+-2.0, though it is much
less flickery.

I don't think you'll see a lot of performance improvements by simply
porting the pixmap engine to gdk-pixbuf.

Regards,
                                        Owen