SWT is slow, Was: D : Not for me anymore

[Jari-Matti Mäkelä]

John Reimer wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 03:04:32 -0700, Jari-Matti Mäkelä
> <jmjmak at utu.fi.invalid> wrote:
> 
>> John Reimer wrote:
>>> As a GUI framework,
>>> however, SWT seems comprehensive and powerful.  It's just not a
>>> well-recognized or an easily learned solution.
>>
>> The only programs using SWT that I know of are Eclipse and Azureus.
>> They're both slower than anything I've ever seen (including most of the
>> Swing using programs). It takes a forever to start either of them,
>> changing tabs/perspectives is just like watching a slide show and
>> writing text has an average lag of 1-2 seconds. Maybe it's because I'm
>> only running a 2.x GHz AMD with 1 GB of RAM and a KDE desktop, but IMHO
>> apps on my old PC (Pentium 100, 32 of RAM, Win98/X11+Fluxbox) are way
>> more responsive than any SWT app on the newer box.
> 
> 
> Perhaps... but I don't find the Win32 DWT port that way at all.  It's
> quite snappy. :)
> And my experiences with Eclipse are quite contrary to yours as well.

There was at least some discussion in Slashdot over two years ago:

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=92172&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=7929925

"First off, SWT only performes well on windows, and stack on top of that
that the principal native abstractions are taylored to a win32
environment. Based off of that it is easy to see how SWT performes quite
nicely on Windows.

Elsewhere it sucks. MacOS, GTK, photon, Motif. Even porrly writeen swing
programs outperform on those platforms."


IMO it's a bit sad to see that SWT has sucked on everything else but
Windows for a very long time now. I personally do not want to support
anything related to GTK or SWT because they're technically very low
quality. I know many companies embrace SWT because the license is quite
liberal, but still it's a sign of apathetic 'Eat shit' attitude to force
clients to use stuff that makes their computers vomit in order to save a
few hundreds of bucks in licensing costs.

Maybe in the future they'll release SWT under EPL and QT will be
available under GPL 3.0 (huge maybe) - then it might become possible to
use QT as a backend for SWT and DWT. IANAL, these licensing things are
hard to understand.

For the time being Harmonia is IMHO the best alternative as an official
GUI library. I will start using it immediately after it is ported to Linux.