[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Irrelevant comparisons (was Re: testing pango with 770)

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

<ironic>
Rocks are cheaper than mobile phones.
And both can be used for communication!
</ironic>

I think it's useless to compare things that don't have the same
features.  If something doesn't have a required feature, all of
its apparent "speed" is useless.

(Note: Qt >v2 is something you could feature-wise compare to
current Gtk, but e.g. current Qtopia is based on Qt v2.)


Gtk 1.x doesn't have double buffering nor antialiased fonts, it
doesn't support internationalized (bi-dir, glyph composition etc)
text input and output, it doesn't support accessibility and full
widget introspection etc.

Because of first, yes, it's faster, but it's also unusable
un-professional looking due to flickering drawing (check e.g.
how awful menus in Gnome 1.x look) and crappy looking fonts.

Pango is also a known bottleneck, but without it the Gtk
users would be restricted mostly to the English speaking
minority <insert here "Hello world!" in Chinese and Indic/>.

Because of last, you cannot do GUI tools, higher level language
bindings or automated testing for Gtk applications as easily
as you can do for Gtk v2.x. And so on.


	- Eero

Pre-mature optimization is root of all evil.  See also the
fun quotes on the http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/ site...