[Lazarus] Performance of GTK 2 and CE

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Luiz Americo Pereira Camara wrote:
> Mark Morgan Lloyd escreveu:
>> Having said that I want to try to get 0.9.27 onto my remaining available 
>> SPARC system, I'm very worried at the prospect of being marooned with 
>> gtk1 on 0.9.24 while the rest of the World moves on
> 
> Did you tried to compile/use 0.9.27 with gtk1? It still possible to do 
> that. No need to switch to older versions of Lazarus/fpc.

I got to the point of being able to compile 0.9.26 with gtk1 but it 
would bomb as soon as started, there might be residual problems in the 
underlying FPC 2.2.3. I think Vincent looked at it a bit on one of my 
machines but had other pressures. I want to try to find time to look at 
0.9.27, but I don't know how quickly I'll manage it, reverting to 
reliable 0.9.24 then producing the timing figures has been a lot of work.

The problem is that gtk1 /is/ obsolescent. I maintain that it can't be 
considered deprecated until Debian "Lenny" is stable which won't be for 
at least a few more months, and it certainly can't be tagged as obsolete 
by Lazarus for as long as our stable release uses it as the default: 
maybe this time next year.

Sooner or later it won't be possible to insert gtk1 into a standard 
distro and there will be some reason why it's no longer possible to 
apply kernel patches and security updates- my guess would be because of 
some change in the way udev and related subsystems work. I've already 
found myself in that position with my SS1000Es which won't run anything 
later than Linux 2.2 (i.e. Debian "Woody") reliably, I've never found an 
FPC version that will run on them.

So I obviously can't conclude anything until I put more time into 
0.9.26/27 on SPARC. I'd very much like to get it running reliably, apart 
from anything else that would give me more incentive to carry on using 
Delphi and Lazarus and hopefully to be able to put something useful back 
into the project. I'm keenly aware that if I looked at alternatives such 
as .NET/Mono I'd probably find that support for fading architectures 
would  be far worse.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]