Re: "Lightweight GTK+"?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Simon Budig <Simon Budig unix-ag org> writes: 
> Is it possible to reduce the size of the GTK Library (we don't have
> unlimited resources) e.g. by removing some unused widgets?

You can do a custom GTK build and remove a substantial number of the
widgets and some other features (e.g. unused image loaders and
language modules). Static linking will already strip a lot of unused
stuff of course.

> Would you recommend to use GTK+ in it's current state?

GTK for framebuffer is GTK 1.3.x, which is a development branch - the
API is not fixed. Nonetheless it's reasonably stable at this point. If
you're willing to tolerate a rough edge or two it should work OK, if
you want a full-on shrink-wrapped frozen-solid-API then it's not quite
there yet, but will be soon I hope.

For embedded you should also consider simply using a small version of
X such as the one used for the iPAQ; framebuffer is somewhat smaller
but not hugely so, and its smaller size is achieved at the expense of
multiprocess support.

http://www.redhat.com/devnet/ has an article on GTK framebuffer,
scroll down a bit from the top of the front page and you'll see it.

The primary advantage of GTK for embedded devices is that you get the
same GUI API as a full-fledged computer, and of course the
higher-level full-featured nature of that API; GTK will be larger than
something like FLTK, but will also be a good bit more powerful if you
can afford the size and need the GTK features or the similarity to the
non-embedded API. Tradeoffs, tradeoffs. ;-)

Havoc