Does GTK+ do automated/nightly performance regression testing?

[Clemens Eisserer <linuxhippy gmail com>]

Hi there,

I wonder - is there any automatic / nightly performance regression
testing done against GTK+ development snapshots, like it is done by
other performance-sensitive open-source projects (e.g. mozilla
firefox)?

The reason I ask is, from a subjective point of view, several times
during GTK+'s development I had the impression of performance
regressions introduced by new feature work:
* During the GTK2-8 days, when GTK was migrated to use cairo instead
of GDK's abstraction for drawing widgets
* When GTK-3 was released: Eclipse's SWT is almost twice as slow when
running on top of GTK3 compared to GTK2:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=493714

What I always found rather frustrating: that the only benchmark I know
of (gtkperf) is rather limited in functionality (nobody is interested
how many filled elipses GTK can draw through cairo - or how often a
ComboBox can open it's list). Furthermore it is only compatible for
GTK2.

Now GTK4 is almost ready to be released, and watching the
presentations about the new drawing model, all the CSS properties etc.
I am worried again of performance regressions for real world code.
However with no tools to measure it, it won't be immediatly noticed
and furthermore it is hard to improve performance with no standardized
numbers.

So back to the original question: How does the GTK+ project make sure
to spot performance regressions when they are introduced?
And if there is nothing automated, would there be interest in such a
project -  Would it be useful and used by the developers doing feature
work?

Best regards, Clemens