Re: embedding GTK<->Qt: they can, can we ?

[Mark Leisher <mleisher crl nmsu edu>]

    Billy> Withing the next 2 years my programs (QC) will need to handle the
    Billy> ascii files that eill be > 4gig.  I told this to the wx list and
    Billy> got one response that said that wx was not meant for that much
    Billy> data.  Their new (under development) canvas widget would be great
    Billy> for a small amout of data.  But you must create a rectangle,
    Billy> polygon, circle and others with their classes for their canvas to
    Billy> manage it.  2 copies of a 4 gig file in memory, I DON"T THINK SO!

    Billy> COuld you imagine the amount of memory necessary to display 4
    Billy> million rectangles if I had to maintain my data for output and a
    Billy> canvas maintained its data for display :(

Without terabytes of RAM, this gets tricky.  We ran into the same problem when
dealing with text corpora in the 10's and 100's of Gigabytes that we needed to
view and maybe edit.

You get creative by doing things like loading only the viewable portion and
really working the scrollbars.

    Billy> What I really need is what the old Apollo's had.  A set of
    Billy> functions that directly accessed the graphics and did not go
    Billy> through an X server.

I think the SVGA library will do this for quite a few Linux boxes.  For the
other big iron, it's every direct graphics toolkit for itself.

    Billy> I do not intend to send 4M draw_rectangles to the X server.  I draw
    Billy> to pixmap the send pixmap to server.

    Billy> In X terminology I believe it would be phrased as : I draw to
    Billy> memory dc the blit to screen ????

Well, copying pixmaps to the screen through X is pretty fast as it is.  It is
the drawing part that might be a bit slow.

    Billy> Bottom line, I personally don't want to see gtk with a lot of added
    Billy> features that would make it do the same thing as QT.  If you want
    Billy> that then use QT.

If you want serious simplicity, try FLTK (http://www.fltk.org).  It certainly
has its limits, but I like it.  It's just that I don't use C++ enough to make
it worth using all the time.
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Mark Leisher
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