Re: The best/standard way to use opengl in gtk

[Jeremy Henty <onepoint starurchin org>]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 03:47:59PM +0200, Ingo Krabbe wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 09:05:38PM +0800, Jin Huang wrote:
> > I'm a newbie of GTK, and  working on 3D modeling software.  I want
> > to  create  a window  which  can  use  opengl.  The  choice  seems
> > gtkglext.  However, this project is not active now.
> > 
> > Any suggestions?
> 
> [...]
>
> ... clutter  is one of the  best approaches that is  about to become
> de-facto standard.

I would  *not* recommend using  clutter for 3D modeling  software.  At
work  I recently  had to  profile various  approaches to  GTK canvases
(gdk,  foocanvas,  goocanvas,  clutter,  gtkglext).  We  write  genome
browsers so we *have* to render thousands of items quickly.  I imagine
3D modeling  software would have  similar constraints.  We gave  up on
clutter because of its performance.  Not only did it render slowly but
creating a new  clutter item was O(number of  already existing items).
GtkGlext was the only approach  that offered any hope of significantly
improving on good old foocanvas.

Clutter seems to be focussed on eye-candy.  (It has built-in animation
support.   Clutter demos  typically  show off  something  cool like  a
tabbed window that flips the pages like a rolodex.)  That is great for
users writing  desktops and desktop  applications, but it  was useless
for our purposes.  You should  of course profile rather than just take
my word, nevertheless I would expect clutter's performance to be quite
inadequate for 3D modeling software.

BTW, if  you profile  clutter then be  careful: for most  toolkits you
time the expose event handler, but in clutter that just sends an alert
to  a separate  clutter animation  event stream  and triggers  a paint
event handler.  Make sure you profile the right thing!

Regards,

Jeremy Henty