Re: Gtk performance

[Michael Torrie <torriem gmail com>]

Gerardo Di Iorio wrote:
> Hi,
> i started to make an application in gtk.
> I have find on the web why gtk is slow and require much memory!
> Is true?

Yes, no, maybe.

> From my experience, speed is really divided into two things: perception
and throughput.  On the perception side of things, sometimes end users
perceive GTK as slow due to things like flicker during refresh, or
widgets that redraw too many times during a resize.  These are issues
that have been addressed and are being addressed.  Some of the
perception issues have a lot to do with the asynchronous nature of X11,
or due to the way GDK was implemented on windows (windows don't redraw
while being moved on windows xp, for example).  If the problem is X11,
then Qt will exhibit it also.  Things like double buffering and the new
X11 synchronization protocol help with flickering.

As for throughput, you'll need hard numbers to make any judgments there.
   And it all depends on what you are doing too.  From what I've seen,
GTK is probably faster and light than Qt.  Signal propagation is known
to be faster, and in general, GTK is pretty quick, at least as fast as
Qt.  I highly doubt GTK takes up "much" memory compared to Qt either.

Frankly there are lots of reasons to choose one toolkit over the other
but simply "slow" or "much memory" are not initially valid reasons.
Rather ease of development, the richness of the widgets, the ability to
rapidly generate good, usable interfaces, and other factors are much,
much more important to you as a developer.  Whether or not and end user
thinks your program is slow often depends on how badly you've set up the
interface!