[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] RFC: Qtopia Nokia N770 (maemo) porting layer

[From: Kalle Vahlman]

2005/11/8, Clemens Eisserer <linuxhippy at gmail.com>:
> > ...which makes these sound a bit funky. If you use *anything*
> > GUI-related that is already implemented, you'll drag Gtk+ in. Which
> > will mean that you need to have both Qt and Gtk+ libraries in memory
> > at the same time, which I think is not too hot on the current
> > hardware.
>
> >From this point of view I think GTK2 was the completly wrong choice as
> Maemo's GUI toolkit. Its slow (mameo contains even a hacked version
> which tries to speed it up a bit) and heavyweight (megs of code
> splitted in many different shared-libs), but it was choosen for
> compatibility as the whole Xserver based approach. (fox-toolkit  or
> fltk are much more efficient)

If Maemo would get a hacker every time somebody said that...

I assume Qt has not got "megs of code" then?
The Qt site boasts that:

"The Qt Class Library  is a growing library of over 400 C++ classes [..]"

That doesn't sound lightweight to me ;)

Gtk+ is, in my opinion, fast enough for the 770, the bulk of the
performance issues come from the limited memory from which the (AFAIK
non-gtk) system services occupy a fair share and from the fact that
there is virtually no acceleration for the graphics.

> I think with this decision in mind a port of QT would not be that bad
> either since it would allow running apps on your Maemo powered device
> which would not be able to run otherwise or would not look that good.

I'm all for a Qt version, diversity is good.

It's having both of them in memory at the same time that is bad. Which
also means that running programs for both at the same time would be
bad too.

And as said, most of stuff already done is in Gtk+, so you'd
effectively have to write the GUI bits from scratch. But hey, in case
you haven't noticed, Maemo is free software ;)

--
Kalle Vahlman, zuh at iki.fi
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