Re: GTK+ (Was: Evolution 2.0 and GNOME 2.6)

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

Hello,

> I find GTK+ slower than Qt, yes, and also the overall "speed experience" is
> much worse than OSX's and XP's (especially the 2.x series). I have talked
> about this in the past but all we get from Owen in the bugzilla is "show me
> benchmarks" and "prove it with some code", which obviously doesn't help
> normal users (non-programmers) to explain the slowness. I have used GTK+ on
> a variety of distros and OSes, on a variety of hardware with the same
> result: slowness (comperatively of course), ugly redraws etc. I don't need a
> benchmark to prove that the GTK+ application experience *feels* slower than
> the competition's: I have my eyes for that (for example, when I right-click
> on galeon or abiword or *any* other heavy gtk app I can visibly see the
> popup context menu coming up and *then* populating its entries with text -- 
> that's just plain ugly).

I do not run Galeon or Abiword, but I do run a lot of other Gnome apps,
and I just tried popups in Evolution and in Gaim on a 300 Mhz machine,
and they come up immediately, so am inclined to believe that it is a bug
in those applications.

Maybe they are doing a .Show() on the toplevel window and then adding
the contents or something, but it is not Gtk+'s fault.

So with your data point and my data point, all we know is that popups
can be fast with Gtk+, or your soul has been overclocked.  

If we know that Gtk+ is not to blame for popups, then we need to
pinpoint what is wrong with the other applications, and I believe that
this is what Owen is after.   We do not know what is it that you feel is
wrong.

On the same machine, KDE feels a lot slower, so I am not sure what
exactly is the problem that you are raising is.  And without more actual
data, it is going to be hard to tell.

miguel.