Re: Speedups for GTK2 bindings?

[Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com>]

On Tue, 19 Aug 2003, Andreas Rottmann wrote:

> I'll probably try what speedups result of re-implementing the
> re-export-bindings and functions->methods-public helpers in C. 

Great! A lot of that code is (as you know) slow slow slow slow slow, and
since I don't fire up the gtk side of things too often, I don't really
see it very much.

From informal observation, the slowest parts of the whole thing are
 * loading (gnome gtk gw-gtk), which means registering all of the
   functions (takes about 10s or so on my machine)
 * loading (gnome gtk generics) (takes about 15s or so)

I think that re-export-bindings procedure is kindof hackish; I think I
saw another module saying something like

(set-module-uses! (gnome gtk %module-public-interface) (gnome gtk gw-gtk
  %module-public-interface))

or something like that (not in (gnome gtk), but something within guile
itself). This sort of thing sounds like a question to ask guile-devel...
Also, I don't think re-export-modules takes all that much time either.
Dunno though, it would be helpful to time things so you can quanitify
improvement. 

With regards to the slowness in loading gw-gtk, that's g-wrap's
slowness. You might try profiling the code to see if some code path is
really inefficient (like calling scm_c_lookup() too many times or
something). I haven't done this yet because it hasn't pissed me off
enough, but using gtk daily would do it ;) Anyway, this could be fixed
in g-wrap -- there's no reason for it to take so long, PyGTK loads up
quickly.

Now, making the generics. Perhaps that could be done at the same time as
the functions are registered; that would avoid all the setting of
procedure properties that is done in the ccodegens.

These are just some ideas I'd had, dunno how correct they are. Heed them
or not, as you like! BTW, you can go ahead and commit your fix. Also,
Andreas you can commit anything else that seems correct to you,
especially if it results in faster load times ;)

regards,

wingo.