Re: Comments on GTK+ patches from Atk tarball

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

One more comment about Owen's observation (below):

The overhead of initializing the GtkWidget classes which have specific 
accessibility factories associated with them will only be incurred when 
running GTK+ in an "Adaptive/Assistive Technology setting", that is, the 
startup penalty will only happen if you are in a situation where you 
need it.  So maybe this issue is not as important as it first seemed.

The calls to gtk_widget_class_set_accessibility_factory() only happen in 
the agtk module initialization code (optional runtime loadable module), 
not in the atk library.  In the cases where agtk is loaded or needs to 
be loaded, I think it is expected that some additional overhead may be 
incurred, though of course it would be nice to reduce it.

I am not sure that the added complexity of creating dynamic registries, 
etc. is worth the benefit for the first release of accessibility 
support.  Perhaps we should think about performance enhancements for 2.2 
instead and just go with the expedient solution in 2.0.  Rest assured 
that performance will not be impacted if the accessibility runtime 
support is not loaded.

-Bill

>>> * The overhead of initializing every class in GTK+ is quite 
>>>   large and we intentionally delay initialization until an
>>>   instance of the class is created. So, I don't think
>>>  
>>>    gtk_widget_class_set_accessibility_factory()
>>> 
>>>   is a good idea; better to have a global factory.
>>
>>There isn't a global factory, there are many factories.  Different 
>>factory instances must be associated with different classes, and 
>>changeable at runtime, thus the method above is required.

------
Bill Haneman x19279
Gnome Accessibility / Batik SVG Toolkit
Sun Microsystems Ireland