<AWT Dev> Question about GtkLnF implementation

Clemens Eisserer linuxhippy at gmail.com
Mon Feb 15 08:53:42 PST 2010


Hi Peter,

> It seems that code is lost. Its author felt it was a dirty hack and a failed
> experiment. He remembers the patch gave significant speedup with vector
> themes, but nearly regressed on pixmap ones.
Thanks a lot for clarification.

> I personally agree that the most promising thing is Cairo drawables. They
> should have alpha, and by the time jdk7 ships, Cairo will probably be
> everywhere.
The problem is GTK+ devs are unwilling to change there theme API to
allow cairo drawables, it still requires a GdkDrawable.
I worked on a solution 2 years ago, but it was rejected because GTK3
will have an all-new theme engine solving all problems.
Now 2 years later, nothing has changed and my patches are still rejected.
No wonder Nokia bought Trolltech, because GTK is almost stalled.

> As for drawing to a single pixmap, there's absolutely no reason not to try.
> I wonder if X could put limits on pixmap size, e.g. we could end up with a
> pixmap twice the size of the screen - this can be a problem maybe.
I did some experiements and did not find any significant speedup :/

I have another idea in mind, detecting vector-only themes but still
passing a GdkDrawable.
That could give a speedup when using strictly vector-only themes.

- Clemens



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