Re: Some initial thoughts about 2.4

[Biswapesh Chattopadhyay <biswapesh_chatterjee tcscal co in>]

<snip>

> Possible features: [off the top of my head]
> 
>  - File selector (we have to get this one)
>  - Combo widget (Kris has made progress here)
>  - New action-based menu API (based on James Henstridge's work, most
>  likely)
>  - Toolbar improvements
>  - GObject private data
>  - Full Unicode 3.2 (4.0?) support, including non-BMP portions.
>  - GtkModelFilter (Pretty much done in libegg)
>  - Make RTL text editing really work (automatic paragraph
>    direction, etc.)
>  - Height-for-width geometry management. (Define a new interface,
>    support it GtkVBox, GtkLabel woudl be the minimum.)
> 

How about performance and footprint improvement ?

GTK2 seems substantially slower and heavier than GTK1 on my machine.
This is obviously not a settings problem since quite a few others have
been saying the same thing on gnomedesktop.org and other places.

It is difficult to 'quantify' the slowness, but I'll try to point out
some specifics:
	o Startup times seem to have increased.
	o Menus, etc. are not as responsive as 1.x.
	o Seems more memory hungry.
	o Scrolling seems slower.
	o Redraws seem slower.
	o Tree/ListView and TextView are significantly heavier and slower than
the old CList and plain text widgets.
	o This is rather vague, but it doesn't doesn't 'feel' fast.

These observations are based on GNOME2 CVS head, the gtk-demo program,
Mozilla and Scintilla (identical code compiled against GTK1 and GTK2).
Specifically:

	o I have tried FOX, GTK1, QT, Windows and GTK2 versions of Scintilla
and the GTK2 version feels the slowest by far.
	o CVS Mozilla is slower when compiled against GTK2.
	o WxWindows apps (I couldn't get the whole thing to compile/work
unfortunately) feel significantly slower and heavier when WX is compiled
against GTK2 vs. the GTK1 and pure X versions.

Currently, I would go as far as to say that GTK2 is the slowest toolkit
on X (after comparing FOX, QT 3.1.1, GTK1.2.10, GTK2 CVS, OpenMotif
2.2). Even AWT seems faster once loaded. The only toolkits slower than
GTK2 currently is Swing IMO.

I am using RH73+, XFree86 CVS and GTK2 CVS. Sun JDK 1.4.1.

Hope this helps.

Thanks and regards,
Biswa.

> I want to keep a HTML plan on www.gtk.org with tentative schedules,
> notes about major items, etc. (gtk-web module is autoupdate,
> so anyone with CVS access can update.)
> 
> I think most of the major features proposals have already had some
> writeup, so the main thing that needs doing is collecting the
> bugzilla and mail archive links.
> 
> Regards,
>                                         Owen
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