Re: Why gtk+ application are so slow

[Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>]

>> I'm using Debian every day... And I've been trying to find why I
>> prefer MS Widows GUI over Gnome. Now I've undesrtood. It's
>> responsiveness. So I know that gtk+ is superior over Win32 becouse of
>> it's portabillity and the most important is the ease of programming
>> with it. But Gnome and GTK applications are considerably slower than
>> Win32 applications. The time betwean the execution of application and
>> the creation of the application's main window is very long... So I'd
>> like to hear some opinions why is it so? I don't like to buy new,
>> /modern/ computer, I want Gnome to work as fast as Windows 2000
>> does...
>
>Can you give some numbers please? I don't see any noticeable delay
>when starting a GTK+ application. So I suspect that something is wrong
>with your setup. There are several things that could be wrong. Your
>font cache could be missing or broken, you might have an extended
>input device configured which isn't available (this causes a long
>timeout due to a bug in X11).

100% echoed. I have never seen GTK+ as "slow", and in fact my
machines, which are dominated by GTK applications, always seem faster
to me than Windows systems (even with faster hardware), and marginally
snappier than some Qt/KDE apps running on the same hardware.

Before you make such vast and overwhelming suggestions ("runtime ->
compile time binding" is very, very far from a trivial change
in the entire design of GTK), please come up with some hard
numbers. Nothing could possibly justify the work required to make such
a change without a set of well-measured comparisons of similar
application code that show the GTK implementation to be fundamentally
slowed by signal marshalling. 

And speaking personally, I don't believe that any measurements you
could make will show such a thing, but I'm willing to keep an open
mind.

--p