[Lazarus] Performance of GTK 2 and CE

[Aleš Katona]

On Wed, 12 Nov 2008 10:21:16 +0000
Mark Morgan Lloyd <markMLl.lazarus at telemetry.co.uk> wrote:

> 
> Fair enough, but I think that puts me in a position that I need to state 
> my policy and that of the people I work for and with.
> 
> My policy is that I would prefer to build up enough competence in 
> Lazarus and FPC to be able to make a worthwhile contribution to them.
> 
> Our policy is that we don't want to be forced into supplying equipment 
> and services to our customers which carry unfavourable technical and 
> contractual baggage. Roughly translated, we don't want to embed MS OSes 
> in x86 kit unless it really is inevitable :-)
> 
> We need to eat, and if it gets to the point where the time I'm putting 
> into dragging myself painfully up the learning curve prevents me from 
> doing concrete development and system management that is going to be a 
> problem. Fortunately I don't think we're particularly near that, but I 
> regularly find that "real work" intervenes in things that are far more 
> interesting and knocks me offline for days or weeks.
> 
> I think you are being slightly unfair characterising Lazarus, and by 
> extension other open-source projects, as being driven entirely by 
> goodwill rather than by enlightened self-interest. The bottom line is 
> that we like Pascal-style languages, we value the integrated design and 
> debugging that Delphi championed in its days of glory, and for a whole 
> lot of reasons we want those facilities on platforms that Borland never 
> took seriously.
> 

I never ment to say it's good-will based. The itch part means it's based on personal needs as well of course. The point was it's not based on 3rd party needs or requests (at least not "enough").

> Now I'm trying to do my bit keeping things going on SPARC, in part 
> because it's a representative non-x86 architecture so is worth attention 
> but also because- at present- it's comparatively easy to get SPARC-based 
> systems which go rather larger than x86-based.
> 
> Finally, I would thank you not to mis-quote me. You claim that I wrote 
> "we'll be forced to go elsewhere". I did not write that, what I put was 
> "I'm in a position where I find myself wondering whether I should start
> looking at C# or possibly Embarcadero's current offering" which I think 
> is fair comment. We should all be doing that now and again, not so much 
> to try to woo new "customers" but simply to ensure that there was not 
> some much-appreciated and easy-to-implement facility which was being 
> overlooked.
> 

Fair enough about the quote, but the wording you used originally made the impression of blackmailing on me, that's where the original tension is from.

I understand your position and the original message now, and to explain my reaction, we get some people here which when their personal needs are not met (usually bussiness driven people), end up being all negativist about the project and start a sort of mini-war about how they'll go to <insert other project here> and how ours sucks etc. usually very immature reactions.

The original misconception was on my side though, I misinterpreted your message as being somewhat blackmail-ish while you were simply stating a decision (the main reason I think was that you mentioned concrete alternatives which led me to believe you ment to do some sort of "they're better" statement).

As to the problem of Gtk2/LCL speed, it's still quite possible there's a bug in LCL which does some unnecessary drawing/signals in gtk2 (this was so in the past, but on my end/setup was fixed). Many people get problems with remote lazarus tho, but I'm not sure if it's only Lazarus/LCL or also other gtk2 programs. Also as I said before, gtk2 performance in general depends heavily on many aspects including the drivers, theme, it's version and settings in X.org (for examply my "miraculous" speed is actually result of using the EXA accelmethod).

I have no idea about CE, the only time I used lazarus CE apps was to test my lib in an emulator (so it was slow enough by itself).

> -- 
> Mark Morgan Lloyd
> markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
> 
> [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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-- 
Aleš Katona <almindor at gmail.com>