Re: Past and future evolution of Gtk+

[Carsten Mattner <carstenmattner gmail com>]

One difference to take into account is how much memory overhead
the different toolkits have. Responsiveness these days is mostly
down to drawing and input architecture. For instance GTK3 does
not behave smoothly when used with a different than GNOME3
or no compositor at all, while curiously Qt5 has no such
regression. That means on current hardware memory overhead
becomes more interesting to optimize than the already fast
enough interactive responsiveness.

Qt5 and GTK3 both seem to be very hard to write a Hello World
X11 or Wayland window that uses less than 25MB to 30MB.
This is something that can quickly become a problem and
deal breaker if you want to run more than a few GUI applications.

I mean I expect a major overhead when using QML since it is
a mini browser engine of sorts, but I don't expect more than 5MB
or 10MB base GUI toolkit overhead, even on 64-bit.

I don't know how much GTK and Qt use on Windows or macOS, but I
do remember that macOS applications occupy IME large amounts of
memory. Windows used to be in the space as X11 when I last ran it
years ago.

I guess what I'm trying to ask is where the resident memory goes
in a GTK or Qt Hello World.