Re: Motif vs. GTK+

[John Cupitt <john cupitt ng-london org uk>]

That's interesting. I've not tested gtk2 vs. Motif, but when I ported my Motif application to gtk1.2, I saw roughly a factor of 10 speed up for application start (loading a complex workspace went from 30s to 3s, as I recall). When I moved my app to gtk2, it about halved in speed, but I'd still expect it to beat Motif by a factor of 5.

Of course it depends what the benchmark is. As you say, gtk2 has much more sophisticated text rendering and layout, so if there's a lot of text, I guess Motif would probably pull ahead. My app created a lot of widgets, and widget creation is extremely expensive on Xt based toolkits (especially if you have a lot of XtResources).

Melvin Hadasht wrote:
> But I do not agree with "much faster", if with that is meant the "user 
> interactivity, displaying widgets, scrolling". Even if AA is not enabled, and the 
> default theme is used, Motif is faster. But on modern hardware (1Ghz and 
> more CPU), the difference may not be visible and the relative slowness is
> not felt. On old hardware (266Mhz), the relative slowness is 
> visible, but is still really useable. Gtk1.2 had the same responsiveness compared to Motif, but Gtk2.x is slower.