Re: Qt Vs Cairo performance comparison

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Wed, 2006-10-25 at 13:02 -0500, Sean Kelley wrote:

> Trolltech has a clear mandate to support embedded side with their
> Qtopia and the desktop side with Qt.  We are struggling on the
> Embedded side to get the same sort of participation and recognition
> with Gtk+.

Good support in GTK+ for embedded platforms will come about when
embedded platform hackers add that support to GTK+.  It won't
materialize by itself.  It will come about in the same way we got
internationalization, accessibility, and other nice and long buzzwords:
someone with interest made them happen.

Qtopia's explicit goal is, I suppose, to be a good platform for embedded
devices.

GTK+, up to very recently, never had that goal.  Someone has to make it
happen.  You will need to see what problems there are currently, whether
they can be solved satisfactorily on all platforms (not just embedded),
or whether you need a fork / second backend / embedded-specific
#ifdefs / etc.

But someone needs to make it happen.  Qtopia has engineers dedicated to
it.  Do you want to dedicate yourself to Embedded GTK+?  Go ahead!

Qtopia probably has fewer moving parts.

GTK+ depends on a big stack:  X11, fontconfig, Xrender, Cairo, Pango,
blah blah blah blah.  There are more moving parts, and consequently
you'll have to think of ways to improve them separately, as well as
attack systemic problems.

> I do worry about existing indefinitely on Gtk+ 2.8 and others on Gtk+
> 2.6 as patches are submitted (fixed point) and changes proposed, but
> no action taken.  So our recourse is to maintain those patches in our
> Subversion repositories and pick and choose what works.

I share your pain.  I have a bunch of patches in Novell's package for
Nautilus and Gnome-VFS, that are not upstream, even though they were
sent for review a long time ago.  The maintainers have very good reasons
for not taking the patches as they are.  But *they* will not fix
*Novell's* problems.  *I* have to fix Novell's problems; that's why they
pay me.  I expect you to do the same for the problems in the embedded
platform space in GTK+.

  Federico the patcher