On Wed, 2005-07-27 at 18:22 +0100, Robert Thorpe wrote: > Users of PCB are attempting to find out why the GTK+ version gPCB is > slower than the Athena version. I'm also beginning to write a graphical > program and deciding which widget set to use, so I'm interested in the > same issue. > > To help us both, it would be useful if anyone knowledgable on this list > could answer a couple of questions: - > > * Are there any general reasons why GTK is slower than other widget > libraries? Is it in fact slower, or is it just common > mis-configurations? GTK+ is slower than Xaw because: - It displays things much more nicely - It has good support for internationalization, accessibility, and many other things that weren't on the radar when Xaw was designed. - It has a much nicer programming interface It's a "you get what you pay for" situation, really. Toolkits designed in the late 80's go really fast on today's hardware. On the other hand, they don't do a whole lot. Our expectation and experience is that GTK+ performs decently for even complex applications on hardware from the last 5 years or so. If your app isn't performing OK, it's probably because you are doing something in particular that is slow. One possibility is text measurement ... text measurement is "free" in the Xaw universe, so a lot of apps designed for that repeatedly relayout and remeasure the same strings, or measure a huge amount of text in a blocking operation. Profiling may show where your app is having difficulties. > * Also, is it true that GTK must handle many events by performing long > string comparison operations? Does this cause a slowdown? String comparison is not a big expense in GTK+ operation. Owen
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