Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] Plugin GUIs
From: Paul Davis (pbd_AT_op.net)
Date: Sun Mar 25 2001 - 20:21:14 EEST
>I don't think so, but I'm not sure GTK+ is the right tool for the job
>if we don't want GTK+ look and feel anyway. There are simpler
>toolkits that are *much* faster - and if we aren't going to use
>standard widgets and GTK+ rendering engines anyway, why drag all that
>in?
The point is, IMHO, to avoid toolkit wars for things with simple GUI
requirements. thats the whole point of the ladspa-gui XML DTD
proposal. you might want to use fltk, i might use Gtk--, someone else
might use Qt2 when they implement a backend that converts the gui spec
into real widgets. but the person designing the GUI for a LADSPA
plugin shouldn't care about such issues, i think. steinberg clearly
think the same, hence libvstgui - same goal, different tool.
>I'm worried about the overhead - GTK+ feels sluggish on all but the
>fastest of my machines... Is a G400 MAX video card really supposed to
>be a reasonable low end requirement!?
use gdb, and take a look at the call trace of a gtk program. you'll
find very little extra overhead compared to Xlib other than an extra
10-20 (low-cost) function calls on the stack during a typical event
handler. there are lots of people who seem to think that GTK does a
whole bunch of extra stuff without you asking for it. its not
true. GTK takes a little longer to start up, but thats partly because
its designed to work in just about situation that X does, which is not
true for some of the super-lightweight toolkits. there was an
interesting thread on gtk-list last week about some SGI workstations,
for example, where there is hardware support for gamma correction, and
as a result, windows can have their own private colormaps (not so on
just any (?) intel-centric video cards).
are you sure you're not complaining about GNOME? thats a different
beast entirely. keep in mind that people are now beginning to
experiment with GtkFB (which uses the linux framebuffer device and not
X) in embedded devices - no G400 cards there. it works fine.
--p
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