Re: future of development for the desktop

[Chris Vine <chris cvine freeserve co uk>]

On Tue, 12 Jun 2012 00:43:28 +0200
Enrico Weigelt <weigelt metux de> wrote:
> * Gour <gour atmarama net> wrote:
> 
> > Found it...it talks about gtk3 2x slower than gtk2 which I really
> > did not notice and cannot say how good that benchmark is to reflect
> > real speed.
> 
> Well, AFAIK, gtk had become much more dynamic than its older versions.
> Maybe that's the problem: too many dynamic (heap) allocations,
> lookups, etc, etc.
> 
> hmm, what could we possibly do about it ?

If there is a difference, and we are in the realm of guesswork, then I
would suspect the different theming engines as a more likely culprit.
I don't think that GDK has changed significantly - as far as I am aware
GTK+3 and later versions of GTK+2 both use cairo and cairo-pango.

I would be surprised if GTK+3 used significantly more heap allocation
than later versions of GTK+2.  Note also that glib memory slices are a
pretty efficient small object allocator.  It is a long time since
malloc() was used for anything other than large block allocations.  Be
careful or you will end up reinventing the wheel.

Chris