Re: gEDA-user: PCB GTK version...

[Dave McGuire <mcguire@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jul 24, 2005, at 8:09 PM, Jakub Piotr Cłapa wrote:
> > ...is slow, as I expected.
> > Its somewhat disappointing to see usability take a second place to 
> > eye candy.
> > I suspect it wouldn't be noticeable on a faster machine but I'd 
> > rather not have needless software "enhancements" dictate when I buy 
> > new hardware.
>
> And I couyld say that I don't like to sacrifice my sight (reading core 
> X11 fonts is really a big pain for me) because of some really too old 
> hardware. Also I really didn't like PCB until it was GTK+2 because it 
> visually sucked.

  So...the software has been needlessly bloated by incompetent 
developers (the GTK people...not Bill or the PCB guys) and you advocate 
buying new hardware to compensate for it?  I'm not sure whether to feel 
nausea or astonishment, but I'm sure one of the two are appropriate.

> That said I would of course welcome someone (you maybe?) who would 
> find the bottlenecks in GTK+2 and speed it up a bit. :)

  It'll take a lot more than one person to speed up GTK.  I expect that 
for every prepubescent "developer" writing bad code in the GTK project 
to show his friends how "clever" he is it'll require two experienced 
programmers to clean up the mess.  That's a lot of people.

  I applaud Bill's efforts on the GTK version of PCB, and I've been 
running it myself quite a lot lately.  In going to GTK, the performance 
hit was noticeable, but it's still reasonably fast on my systems.  In 
my opinion, the functionality and usability that was gained FAR 
outweighs the performance that was lost.  I believe that's saying a lot 
since I was one of one of the most vocal nay-sayers about going to GTK 
when I was convinced that it'd make it a Linux-only program (I don't 
run Linux) but eventually got everything working.

  With regard to improving performance...The performance problems 
almost definitely lie within GTK itself, not PCB's use of GTK.  If the 
GTK developers can be convinced (coerced?  threatened with big sticks?) 
to clean up their code and stop adding the tons of useless bloat that 
they pile in release after release, the GTK-ized PCB will speed up 
automatically.  THAT (in my opinion) is where rants should be directed.

           -Dave

--
Dave McGuire             "I wonder what 'Error Code 1' means. That's
Cape Coral, FL            what it said when it started smoking."  
-Jonathan Patschke