Star Interview with Jeroen van der Zijp of FOX
Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Fri 13th Jul 2007 06:18 UTC, submitted by Sander Jansen
General Development Jeroen van der Zijp, the author of Fox Toolkit, has kindly given kerkythea.net an interview. The Fox Toolkit is a platform independent GUI that has matured over the last years to become one of the fastest and well structured APIs.
E-mail Print r 0   18 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/e37
Permalink for comment 255218
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE[2]: I think you're right
by navaraf on Fri 13th Jul 2007 13:10 UTC in reply to "RE: I think you're right"
navaraf
Member since:
2005-07-08

By looking at the sreenshots, it looks like the widgets are drawn by the toolkit. It doesn't seem to use native widgets (at least under Windows). Am I right? Am I wrong?


You are right. I looked at the source code and verified it.

Non-native widgets are always much slower than native ones.


And you got this info where? This is completely untrue. Under Windows the "native controls" are implemented in user mode (well, except some hacks, but they're not for improving performance) using the very same API that the makers of non-native controls use. Even though I have little experience with other operating systems I know that the common toolkits on Linux all use X11 APIs under the hood and so can do another toolkit. So why exactly would the non-native controls be slower when they can use the same underlying API?! (Of course, they might be poorly implemented, but you said "always".)

To me the disadvantage of non-native controls is that they usually don't fit with the rest of the environment. No matter how much you try to imitate the look and feel of the platform you're doomed to fail, because new version of the platform can be advanced somehow (themes, spell checking, IME or other such feature) and your custom controls won't reflect that.

Edited 2007-07-13 13:13

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 5