Re: gtk 1.2 and gtk 2.4

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sat, 2005-03-05 at 10:58 -0800, Xiaodong Zhou wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> C/C++ interpreter Ch has bindings to GTK 2.4.
> We noticed that the speed of running GTK application in Ch is very slow. 
> However, the speed for bindings to GTK 1.2 is fine. 
> 
> The reasons I noticed is that the header files in the new release (2.4)
> contains many internal functions. They are too big and takes
> too much time to interprete in Ch.

There are almost no internal functions in the GTK+ header files that
I'm aware of. (A quick grep though the GTK+ headers reveals about
100 functions starting with _gtk as compared to about 2700 public
entry points. So, a very small fraction.)

GTK+-2.x is a much more complex system than GTK+-1.2; there really
isn't much of a way around that... it's bigger because it does 
more. 

To use it from an interpreter, you'll have to figure out some way
of quickly processing the 42,000 lines of header files. (Up from
around 22,000 in GTK+-1.2) Maybe it's possible to precompile them to an
intermediate form and cache the results of that.

Regards,
						Owen