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
