Re: [GtkGLExt] Creating a new widget type vs. modifying an instance of an existing type

[Braden McDaniel <braden endoframe com>]

On Sat, 2005-01-01 at 02:14 +1300, Alif Wahid wrote:
> Hi Braden,
> 
> > For various reasons I thought it better to change this approach to one
> > where I simply use GtkDrawingArea directly and add GL capabilities and
> > event callbacks to it when I construct it. This involved little more
> > than moving some code around; and I had assumed that the user-visibible
> > effect of this change would be nil. However, this appears to have had a
> > significant impact on performance. Now when pressing a mouse button over
> > the widget there is a significant delay before the widget response,
> > where before it was virtually instantaneous. I'm also observing some
> > crashes since making this change that suggest the event callbacks are
> > now occurring on a different thread from before--surprising, but perhaps
> > only because I don't know GTK well enough.
> 
> Are you able to test your programming approach with code taken from one 
> of the example programs that ship with GtkGLExt? The examples just 
> create a standard GtkDrawingArea and add GL capability to it along with 
> standard signal callbacks.

Since the examples exhibit no such performance problems with that
approach, I doubt it. I can't see that they're doing anything
significantly different from what I'm doing.

> A code snippet would help perhaps, to further clarify the problem you're 
> having.

I'm afraid anything I could provide as a snippet here would lack too
much context. But the code is available if you'd like to take a look:

        <http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=7151>

openvrml-0.15.3 uses the approach that creates a new widget type.
openvrm-0.15.4 uses the approach like the GtkGLExt examples. The code of
interest is in "mozilla-plugin/src/openvrml.cpp".

You can also see this via ViewCVS:

        <http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/openvrml/openvrml/mozilla-plugin/src/?only_with_tag=OpenVRML-0_15_3-RELEASE>
        <http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/openvrml/openvrml/mozilla-plugin/src/?only_with_tag=OpenVRML-0_15_4-RELEASE>

>  I cannot see anything wrong with your approach since that's the 
> approach we took when writing all the example programs. I suspect the 
> problems are occuring may be because of the multithreaded nature of 
> Mozilla and how it loads plugin modules.

I suspect you're right. Though, the multithreading issues here seem to
have to do with the GUI rather than actually loading the module. (I'm
over that hurdle... I hope.) I guess I need to find someone intimately
familiar with how Mozilla uses GTK.

BTW, do you know if Naofumi is still active on this project?

-- 
Braden McDaniel                           e-mail: <braden endoframe com>
<http://endoframe.com>                    Jabber: <braden jabber org>