Re: kde people is saying gtk is slow...

[Antonio Campos <acampos ceronet com>]

Karl Nelson wrote:

> > Kde people (on www.kde.org) is saying gtk (or is it gnome?) is painfully
> > slow refreshing the widgets ( I wouldn't say so much, but hey, I have to
> > admit that one of the things that more disturbs me in Gnome/Gtk is the
> > flashing of the redrawings, compared to Kde 1.2 ).
>
> Asside from refreshing, I have done some benchmarking of various components
> of gtk and Qt.  Gtk+ emits signals about 3 times faster than Qt.
> It would rank 4.5us per emit compared to 15us per Qt emit on the scale
> used in the libsigc++ benchmarking page.  This is of course
> 10 times slower than libsigc++, but then any string based system is
> going to be a bit slow.  Considering a far amount of the time spent
> in the widget set is emitting signals, optimization here may help although
> not by much one would need to profile the code to see how slow calls
> translate into precentage time spent.  (Gtk+ has a lot more things
> which it does like create emission records for emission stops which
> means many function calls, and thus a slower system.)
>

I don't understand you correctly. You say here, that Gtk+ is "a slower
system", but above you say that Gtk+ emits signals about 3 times faster than
Qt. What am I missing?

I think the main reason why Gtk+ seems slow is that the drawing events aren't
handled correctly in the GDK layer or maybe with some Gtk+ themes (there
themes that seem to redraw at slow motion, sincerely). I'm willing to see the
new Gtk+ 2.0 fixing all this stuff. Owen has been working hard on this, so
it's just a matter of time.
Of course, it's clear to everyone (or at least should be this way), that we
want faster redrawing in Gtk+/Gnome (Mozilla included, the future
Nautilus,...) that we have now, because this is a thing that windows and kde
people aren't going to lose in their desktops...

>
> --Karl