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

[Vlad Harchev <hvv hippo ru>]

On Fri, 2 Mar 2001, Nathan Hurst wrote:

> 
> On Fri, 2 Mar 2001, Vlad Harchev wrote:
> 
> >  I guess using imlib2 somehow with pixmap engine somehow will improve state of
> > matters with pixmap-engine based themes considerably since imlib2 contains
> > hand-optimized assembly versions of some time-consuming routines.
> 
> 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.

> njh

 Best regards,
  -Vlad