Re: Q: Suitability of GTK+ for critical embedded application

[John Cupitt <jcupitt gmail com>]

On 12/3/05, Are Leistad <are leistad chello no> wrote:
> The one thing that makes me hesitate is the question about stability.
> By stability I mean lack of (serious) bugs and memory leaks.

I'm not embedded, but the GTK app I usually work on (medium sized?
250,000 lines) seems leak-free, according to valgrind.

I've found three or four GTK crash bugs over the last five years, but
they've been easy to patch around. Having the source to the whole GUI
is just great. I've posted fixes to bugzilla and they've gone into GTK
(and in to the next version) within a few days, usually.

Something people have complained about is out of memory handling. GTK
does not even attempt to do this: if malloc() fails, your program will
promptly abort(). A possible fix is to keep some small-ish amount of
RAM in reserve (1MB?) and to start using that when the system malloc()
stops. That gives your program a little time to either save state and
restart, or perhaps flush some caches or something and keep going.

>   - performance with thousands visible/hidden widgets on a 500MHz system?

GTK used to feel fast on my 450MHz desktop machine 5 years ago. It's
become a bit slower since then with the fancy new font system. It
should be easy to do some benchmarks I guess.

>   - is there a minimal HTML rendering widget available (for a help system)?

Yes, there's gtkhtml2, though I've not used it. I think it just does
plain HTML (ie. no CSS etc).